People v. Mayfield

• Citation: 5 Cal.4th 142,19 Cal.Rptr.2d 836,852 P.2d 331
• Decision Date: 27 May 1993
• Docket Number: No. S004568,S004568
• Court: United States State Supreme Court (California)
• Parties: , 852 P.2d 331 The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Demetrie Ladon MAYFIELD, Defendant and Appellant. In re Demetrie Ladon MAYFIELD, on Habeas Corpus. Crim. 23339 and Crim. 25196.

Page 836

19 Cal.Rptr.2d 836

5 Cal.4th 142, 852 P.2d 331

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Demetrie Ladon MAYFIELD, Defendant and Appellant In re Demetrie Ladon MAYFIELD, on Habeas Corpus.

No. S004568.

Crim. 23339 and Crim. 25196.

Supreme Court of California In Bank.

May 27, 1993.

As Modified on Denial of Rehearing

July 21, 1993.

[5 Cal.4th 162] [852 P.2d 334] Sanford Jay Rosen and Andrea G. Asaro, under appointments by the Supreme

Court, Barbara Y. Phillips, Stuart Buckley, Jody Lerner, Sallyanne Campbell, Allison M. Zieve, Rosen & Phillips and Rosen, Bien & Asaro, for defendant and appellant.

John K. Van de Kamp and Daniel E. Lungren, Attys. Gen., Steve White and George Williamson, Chief Asst. Attys. Gen., John H. Sugiyama, Asst. Atty. Gen., Jay M. Bloom, Jesus Rodriguez, Frederick R. Millar, Jr., Dane R. Gillette, Herbert F. Wilkinson, Deborah Factor and Garrett Beaumont, Deputy Attys. Gen., for plaintiff and respondent.

MOSK, Justice.

Demetrie Ladon Mayfield awaits, at San Quentin Prison, execution of a judgment of death. A jury convicted him of two counts of first degree murder. (Pen.Code, §§ 187, 189.) ¹ The jury found true the special circumstance alleged in each count: that defendant, in addition to one first degree murder, was convicted at trial of an additional murder in the first or second degree. (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(3).) At the conclusion of the penalty trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The trial court denied defendant's motion to modify the verdict and entered judgment.

In the 24 hours following the killings, defendant was arrested for their commission. He confessed to them that day during an interrogation that was audiotaped. The next day he agreed to reenact the crimes. The reenactment was videotaped.

Defendant's taped description of the killings' circumstances left no possibility of dispute at trial that he had shot and killed both victims and murdered the second of them. The only questions were whether the murder of the second victim was in the first or second degree, and whether the killing of the initial victim was murder or involuntary manslaughter. The prosecution theorized that defendant had carried out two brutal executions. The defense contended that the first killing was an accident, hence involuntary manslaughter, and the second a rash impulse, hence second degree murder. The trial's guilt and penalty phases together took 10 days.

FACTS

A. Guilt Phase Facts.

Early on the morning of February 3, 1983, police found the bodies of Ora Mae Pope and Edward Moreno ² in a shed adjoining the Pope residence. Both had just died from gunshot wounds. Within hours of the discovery, police arrested defendant at his home. They also recovered a shotgun from the house of Patricia Harper, a friend of defendant.

Defendant, a young man, had known Ora Mae Pope for about two years; her son Byron was a friend of defendant's. But there was evidence that defendant was angry at the Pope family. Defendant had been arrested for the theft of the Popes' 1968 Pontiac, and Byron Pope or his mother, or both, had decided to press charges against him. Defendant had been sentenced to a year in jail and was awaiting incarceration when he committed the killings.

The trial produced strong evidence that defendant had plotted the killing of Ora Mae Pope in order to exact revenge on one or both of the Popes, and that he had killed Edward Moreno because he witnessed Ms. Pope's killing.

There was evidence that before the crimes defendant told two witnesses he was going to kill Ora Mae Pope as revenge for the car-theft prosecution. The witnesses--defendant's friend Glen Brooks, and defendant's cousin Michael Taylor--denied having heard defendant say so. In turn, however, the prosecution introduced evidence of prior inconsistent statements (Evid.Code, § 1235) in the form of taped telephone conversations. In one, Taylor told a detective that on the day of the killings defendant said he was going to kill Ms. Pope because of the car-theft charges. In the other, Brooks told the detective that he was present at Taylor's house the day of the killings and had heard defendant say, "Man, I'm going to kill Home Boy's mother." In addition, Patricia Harper testified that defendant, just before the killings, had said something to the effect that Ms. Pope and Edward Moreno were "going to get theirs." ³

Patricia Harper's testimony established that the night of the killings defendant left her house and surreptitiously approached the nearby Pope residence. For a few minutes, apparently through the living room window, he spied and eavesdropped on Ora Mae Pope and Edward Moreno, who were sitting on the living room couch. When defendant returned to Harper's house, he told her he was angry about what he had overheard.

As mentioned above, defendant gave a confession on February 3, 1983, which was audiotaped, and on February 4 he reenacted the killings and the events surrounding them on videotape. The tapes established that after the eavesdropping foray described in the previous paragraph, defendant obtained his 12-gauge shotgun, which he had previously sawed off, and went back to the Pope residence with two shells--all the ammunition he owned. With a screwdriver he removed the screen from a window in the Popes' bedroom and pried open the window. He crept through the bedroom into the living room, where he confronted Ora Mae Pope about the car-theft prosecution. Defendant aimed the loaded, cocked shotgun at her while the two discussed or argued about the car-theft charges. The gun discharged and killed her. Defendant then shot and killed Edward Moreno, seated on the same couch as Ms. Pope, because he was a witness to Ms. Pope's killing.

In his audiotaped confession, defendant gave two accounts of Ora Mae Pope's death. While they were arguing or discussing the car-theft charges, Ms. Pope leaned over to get a cigarette and defendant, with his finger on a hair trigger, accidentally discharged the gun; or she started to come at defendant from the couch and he shot her because he was scared or startled.

Defendant dragged the two victims--Ms. Pope still showing signs of life, but Edward Moreno dead--to an outside storage shed. In a futile attempt to erase evidence of the shootings, he hosed blood off the pavement between the house and the shed, locked the house, and restored the rear window to its original condition. He took the shotgun to Patricia Harper's house, telling her he had shot the victims. "He said he did it," she testified. "It slipped. He didn't mean to. And then he had to.... He had to do the second one." She also testified that defendant showed her the two spent shotgun shells, and that she permitted him to conceal the weapon on the premises. Defendant then told Harper, in her words, that he was "going to go wait for Byron, too" and to "get Byron, too."

There was evidence that, carrying a towel-wrapped kitchen knife he had obtained from the Pope residence, defendant returned thereto to lie in wait for Byron Pope behind a nearby parked van. Pope testified that defendant approached him from the van and confronted him, the towel containing the knife wrapped around his arm. The two wrestled and defendant succeeded in forcing Pope to leave without entering the house. Defendant essentially confirmed this account in his taped statements. ⁴ After warding off Pope, defendant went home. Later that morning the police found him there.

Defendant waived opening statement, did not testify, and did not present any witnesses. His defense consisted of the playing of the complete audiotaped confession [852 P.2d 337] --the prosecution had played only excerpts--and closing argument.

At closing argument defendant's counsel contended that the first killing was an accident and that the second was second degree murder. He asserted that it was implausible defendant would have calculatedly lied to the police when he described the killing of Ora Mae Pope as an accident, but then forthrightly admitted he killed Edward Moreno to silence a witness. Defendant did not know the meaning of special circumstances or death eligibility; as far as he knew, when he was confessing to the police he was confessing to murder. In defendant's mind, he threw himself completely on their mercy--in counsel's words, he "put his neck in the noose...."

Therefore, counsel argued, the jury should accept that the first killing was an accident. The defense acknowledged the existence of evidence of premeditation of that killing, but maintained that defendant had abandoned any intent to kill before his shotgun accidentally discharged.

With regard to the killing of Edward Moreno, the defense conceded it was murder, either of the first or second degree, but contended that it was the latter because defendant had not had sufficient time to deliberate and form the specific intent to kill. Defendant argued that if the jury agreed that Moreno's death was murder but could not find it to be first degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt, it was legally bound to convict him of second degree murder.

The prosecution emphasized its theory that neither version of defendant's story that Ora Mae Pope's killing was accidental was true: defendant had killed Ms. Pope purely for revenge. The prosecution also argued that the evidence showed the killing of Edward Moreno was deliberated and premeditated. In answer to defendant's claim that the shotgun had a hair trigger, at closing argument the prosecution invited the jury--which had access to the gun as a trial exhibit--to squeeze the trigger.

B. Penalty Phase Facts.

The prosecution introduced evidence of criminal activity involving the use or attempted use of force or violence (§ 190.3). There was evidence that on October 9, 1982, defendant, angry at a former girlfriend who had broken up with him that day, fired a rifle round through her family's living room window after saying to her, in effect, "If I can't have you,...