People v. Loy

• Citation: 52 Cal.4th 46,127 Cal.Rptr.3d 679,254 P.3d 980
• Decision Date: 31 August 2011
• Docket Number: No. S076175.,S076175.
• Parties: The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent,v.Eloy LOY, Defendant and Appellant.
• Court: California Supreme Court

52 Cal.4th 46

254 P.3d 980

127 Cal.Rptr.3d 679

11 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 8439

2011 Daily Journal D.A.R. 10,091

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent,

v.Eloy LOY, Defendant and Appellant.

No. S076175.

Supreme Court of California

July 7, 2011.Rehearing Denied Aug. 31, 2011.

OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE Michael J. Hersek, State Public Defender, under appointment by the Supreme Court, and Marianne D. Bachers, Deputy State Public Defender, for Defendant and Appellant.Edmund G. Brown, Jr., and Kamala D. Harris, Attorneys General, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Pamela C. Hamanaka, Assistant Attorney General, Sharlene A. Honnaka and Susan Sullivan Pithey, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.CHIN, J.

[52 Cal.4th 50 , 254 P.3d 985]

A jury convicted defendant Eloy Loy of the first degree murder of Monique Arroyo under the special circumstance of a murder committed while engaged in the commission of a lewd and lascivious act on a child under the age of 14. (Pen.Code, §§ 187, 190.2, subd. (a)(17).) After a penalty trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The court denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict and sentenced defendant to death. (pen.code, § 190.4.) this appeal is automatic. (pen.code, § 1239, subd. (b).) We affirm the judgment.

I. The Facts

A. Guilt Phase

The evidence showed that during the night of May 8–9, 1996,¹ defendant entered the bedroom of his 12–year–old niece, Monique Arroyo, while she was sleeping. He assaulted her sexually, killed her, and dumped her body in a nearby vacant lot, where it was discovered four days later.

1. Prosecution Evidence

On the afternoon of May 8, defendant went to the Wilmington home of his sister, Rosalina Arroyo, and her family. Rosalina's 12–year–old daughter, Monique Arroyo, also lived at that house. Monique shared an upstairs bedroom with her older sister, Josette. Previously, defendant had lived at that home for a while. At this time, however, he was residing with his brother and sister-in-law, Leonard and Maria Loy, who lived about five to 10 miles from the Arroyo home. Some of the witnesses testified that defendant had not been at the Arroyo house for several weeks before that day, and that he normally was not allowed to go upstairs.

That afternoon, a movie location manager arrived and spoke with Rosalina. The manager arranged to use the Arroyo house in a movie project. Monique was to have an opportunity to appear as an extra in the project. She arrived home from school around 2:45–3:00 p.m., and was excited about the movie opportunity.

Defendant helped Monique's brother, Jose Arroyo, Jr. (Jose), work on a sprinkler system in the front yard. When they finished, defendant and Jose went out drinking beer, using defendant's car, a red Cadillac. After various stops, including one where they put about one dollar's worth of gasoline in the tank, all they could afford at the time, they returned to the Arroyo home. Defendant parked his car on the street. Initially, Jose, who had become intoxicated, refused to get out of the car. Defendant pleaded, “Get out. I have to be at work at six o'clock sharp.” Defendant repeatedly said he had to go to work at 6:00 a.m. Around this time, Jose saw his brother Gabriel. Defendant told Gabriel that Jose was drunk and asked for help getting Jose out of the car. Eventually, defendant, Jose, and Gabriel entered Jose's bedroom on the second floor. Normally, defendant was not permitted to go upstairs. By this time, Jose was “really drunk.” He lay down and asked Gabriel and defendant to leave his bedroom. It was around 11:45 p.m. They left and Jose fell asleep. To get downstairs from Jose's bedroom, one has to pass by Monique's bedroom.

Gabriel testified that he went downstairs to his bedroom and defendant went downstairs with him. He thought defendant was leaving the house by the front door, but he did not actually see him leave or hear a door close. Gabriel went to bed around midnight. He looked to see that the doors to the outside were closed. The lights were off in the house. Defendant's car was still in front. Gabriel did not hear it leave.

Josette spent that night at her boyfriend's house, so Monique was alone in her bedroom. Monique had occasionally locked her bedroom door, but she stopped doing so because of Josette's complaints. Around 10:00 p.m., Rosalina told Monique to go to bed. Jose Arroyo, Sr., Monique's father, testified that when he went to bed around 9:30 to 10:00 p.m., Monique was already asleep. Rosalina herself went to bed around 12:20 a.m., May 9. Before she did so, she twice checked on Monique, who was asleep in her bedroom. Monique's bedroom door was not locked. Rosalina testified that Monique was wearing blue shorts and what she described as a “tank top” or a “sweater.” Jose, Sr., described Monique's clothing as “jeans and a dark sweater or shirt.”

Around 1:00 a.m. that morning, Rosalina was awakened by a creak in the stairway that sounded like “footsteps coming up.” She “jumped up,” went to her door, and yelled out, “Joey [Jose], Gabe, is that you downstairs?” She listened by the door for about three minutes but heard nothing else. Thinking it might have been her imagination, she went back to sleep. The door to Monique's door was still closed.

The next morning, Monique was missing. Her father awoke around 5:30 a.m. and, around 6:05 to 6:10 a.m., noticed that her bedroom door was open and that she was not in the room. He told Rosalina that Monique was not there but then went to work around 6:30. The side door to the house had an inner and an outer door. When Jose, Sr., left, the inner door was open and the outer door unlocked. Members of the Arroyo family looked for Monique but could not find her. Her brother Jose looked in her bedroom. He observed Monique's sheets on the floor in the middle of the bedroom, as if they had been thrown there. Later, Jose found in Monique's closet on the bottom of a pile of clothes the shirt that Rosalina testified Monique was wearing when she went to bed.

Josette arrived home around 7:20 that morning. She observed a sheet from Monique's bed on the driveway. She went upstairs, where Monique's alarm clock was going “full blast.” No sheets were on Monique's bed. Some were on the floor. That morning, Josette called the home where defendant was living. Defendant told her that he had gone straight home after leaving the Arroyo house the night before. Josette testified that she checked and determined that none of Monique's clothes or shoes were missing. There was no sign of a forced entry into the house.

On May 12, Monique's nude body was found in a vacant lot about one-half to three-fourths mile from the Arroyo home. The body was badly decomposed and covered with maggots. It had to be identified by dental records. When found, the body was covered by a comforter that had been on Monique's bed, identical to another comforter belonging to Josette. The comforter was not in Monique's room the morning she was discovered missing.

Leonard Loy, with whom defendant was living at this time, testified that the night before Monique was discovered missing, he went to bed around 11:30 p.m. Defendant was not home. Sometime later, Leonard got up and noticed that defendant was not home then either. Maria Loy testified that at 5:35 a.m. that morning, the alarm clock defendant used to wake up in the morning went off. She waited for someone to turn it off. When no one did so, she turned it off herself. Defendant was not home at the time, and his car was not parked in its usual spot. Maria went back to bed, reawakening shortly before 7:00 a.m. This time defendant was home.

Howard Wilson, who lived about two houses from where defendant was living at the time, testified that around 2:30 a.m. on May 9, he observed defendant driving his red Cadillac. Defendant looked at him and drove by very slowly. Defendant's car turned around and passed by a second time, then a third time. Then Wilson observed defendant walking away from his house.

Dr. Lisa Scheinin performed the autopsy. In her opinion, the cause of death was “asphyxia due to compression of the face and/or the neck and/or the body.” She testified that asphyxia is “the most common sex-associated way of killing people.” Visually, Dr. Scheinin did not observe any obvious signs of injury to the genitalia, but an injury could not be ruled out because the body was badly decomposed. Microscopically, she found bleeding in various areas of the vagina, which was consistent with sexual penetration. No semen was found on the body or the comforter covering it, but that did not rule out sexual activity.

A criminalist compared fibers taken from the comforter that had covered Monique's body with fibers from the carpet in defendant's car. Twenty fibers from the comforter were similar to carpet fibers from the car “in microscopic characteristics and fiber type, the color, and color variation being the fading of the carpet.”

A small bloodstain was found on the inside of the trunk lid of defendant's car. Erin Riley, a serologist, performed deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis of the bloodstain, using the polymerase chain reaction method. She determined that the bloodstain could have been Monique's blood but not defendant's. One person in about 125,000 would match that blood's DNA profile. Blood found on the comforter was consistent with Monique's blood. The comforter also contained faint DNA markers consistent with defendant's DNA. Defendant's left palm print was found on the outside portion of the doorframe of Monique's bedroom.

David Faulkner, an entomologist, examined maggots collected from the body. Based on the development of the maggots, he could estimate how long they had been associated with the body. In his opinion, they had been associated with the body between 3.5 and 3.7 days, meaning that they were deposited on the body sometime between around 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on May 9. Because most insects do not fly at night, the body...