People v. Perez, S104144

Decision Date01 March 2018
Docket NumberS104144
Parties The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Joseph Andrew PEREZ, Jr., Defendant and Appellant.
CourtCalifornia Supreme Court

4 Cal.5th 421
411 P.3d 490
229 Cal.Rptr.3d 303

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent,
v.
Joseph Andrew PEREZ, Jr., Defendant and Appellant.

S104144

Supreme Court of California

Filed March 1, 2018


A. Richard Ellis, under appointment by the Supreme Court, for Defendant and Appellant.

Kamala D. Harris and Xavier Becerra, Attorneys General, Dane R. Gillette and Gerald A. Engler, Chief Assistant Attorneys General, Ronald S. Matthias, Assistant Attorney General, Alice B. Lustre, Glenn R. Pruden and John H. Deist, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

CUÉLLAR, J.

4 Cal.5th 427

In November 2001, Joseph Andrew Perez, Jr., was sentenced to death for killing Janet Daher during a March 1998 robbery at

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Daher's home. This is Perez's automatic appeal. Perez alleges several defects both at his jury trial and in California's administration of the death penalty. We affirm the judgment.

I.

On March 24, 1998, Janet Daher was found dead in her home in Lafayette, California. An indictment filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court on March 24, 1999, charged Perez along with Lee Snyder and Maury O'Brien of four crimes related to Mrs. Daher's death: murder, residential robbery, residential burglary, and vehicle theft. The indictment charged special circumstances for the murder count under Penal Code section 190.2, subdivision (a)(17), alleging that Mrs. Daher was killed during the commission of a robbery and burglary.1 The three cases were severed, and Snyder, who was 17 at the time of the crimes, was tried first. (See People v. Snyder (2003) 112 Cal.App.4th 1200, 1206, 1216, 5 Cal.Rptr.3d 711.) He was convicted of all four charges and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus six years. ( Ibid. ) Jury selection for Perez's trial started on September 12, 2001, and testimony began on September 24. O'Brien had not been tried when Perez's trial began.

The trial's first witnesses described how the victim's body was discovered. The victim's husband, Joe Daher, testified that he left home for his daughter Lauren's softball game around 2:00 p.m. on the day of Mrs. Daher's death. Mrs. Daher was home at the time, and Mr. Daher left the garage door open. According to Mr. Daher's testimony, he answered a phone call from his other daughter Annie on his way home from the game. Annie had come home from school to find her mother missing and the contents of her mother's purse strewn on the floor. Annie did not go upstairs to the master bedroom, and she eventually called law enforcement. The dispatcher told her that officers had found her mother's vehicle and that officers were

411 P.3d 499

on their

229 Cal.Rptr.3d 313

way to the house. Two officers arrived and one went upstairs. He testified that he found Mrs. Daher's body on the floor of the master bedroom with a phone cord tied "very tightly around her hands" "up to her neck, around her neck." Mr. Daher later helped officers identify the property that was missing from the house, including his wife's sport utility vehicle (SUV) and several thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry.

Law enforcement officers soon began recovering some of the stolen property and identifying suspects. Multiple witnesses told officers that they saw three men near the Daher home on the afternoon of the murder. One of these witnesses testified that he drove within 25 feet of the men and then

4 Cal.5th 429

identified Perez in court. Another witness identified Perez in a photo lineup. Asked in court if Perez was who he saw and identified, the witness testified that he "can't be exact, but yes, he looks a lot like him." Mrs. Daher's SUV was discovered in the yard of a roofing company in Cordelia, a small town near Fairfield. An employee of the roofing company testified that he found the SUV "up against the fence like somebody was trying to hide it." A detective also testified that he had found records showing that Maury O'Brien checked into the Overnighter Motel (less than a half mile from where the SUV was found) on March 24, 1998. The owner of the motel later testified that O'Brien had registered at the motel at 3:31 p.m. on March 24.

Officers tracked O'Brien down about a month and a half after the murder, after the Contra Costa County Sheriff received a tip. The tip eventually led officers to Lacy Harpe, O'Brien's former girlfriend, who told the officers that O'Brien may have been involved with the crime. At first O'Brien denied his involvement in the crime, but the officers told him they had evidence against him. O'Brien then quickly admitted that he was involved in the crime, though he insisted that he did not personally harm Mrs. Daher. O'Brien testified against Perez at trial, describing how the men came to break into the Daher home and kill Mrs. Daher. He testified that he and Lee Snyder were plotting to rob a drug dealer and discussed the plan with their friend Jason Hart, who introduced the two to Perez. O'Brien told jurors that he met with Perez every day in the two or three days before the murder. O'Brien was not planning for the robbery of the drug dealer to take place on March 24, but Perez "showed up unexpectedly" that morning so the men agreed to do it that day. They arranged to meet the drug dealer in Fairfield and decided to take the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).

According to the testimony, the men boarded BART at the Balboa Park station in San Francisco. They planned to get off in either Pleasant Hill or Walnut Creek, but their plans changed. Instead the men debarked the train at the Orinda station to smoke cigarettes. O'Brien testified that Snyder and Perez "were looking out into the hills over there between Orinda and Lafayette" and decided that they "wanted to rob a house instead of going up to Fairfield." The men walked a short distance to some nearby large houses, and began searching for "whatever one would be easiest to break into." O'Brien was carrying a knife, Snyder had a handgun, and Perez was unarmed. The group saw a house with its garage door open. The three went inside, and Perez closed the garage door. They saw Mrs. Daher as soon as they entered the house. O'Brien testified that Perez "put his hand over her mouth and hit her on the head, and she went down to the floor." O'Brien then "held the gun on her" as "[Snyder] went ... through the downstairs rooms and [Perez] went through the upstairs rooms." Mrs. Daher told O'Brien that her daughter "was coming home in 15 minutes," so O'Brien

229 Cal.Rptr.3d 314

"yelled out to [Perez] and [Snyder] that we had 15 minutes to get in and out." O'Brien may

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have used their names when he yelled this, and Perez responded that O'Brien "would have to kill the victim" since he "spoke up and messed it all up."

O'Brien also testified that Mrs. Daher "was very cooperative" throughout the robbery. Snyder and Perez took Mrs. Daher upstairs. O'Brien testified that he heard noises from upstairs, so he went up to the master bedroom, where he saw Snyder "pulling out a telephone cord" and Perez "on the other side of the bed" "maybe holding the victim down." He later saw "Perez on top of the victim"

411 P.3d 500

with "the telephone cord wrapped around [her]." Perez "was pulling really hard on the telephone cord" and Mrs. Daher's "neck was twisted back." O'Brien testified that Perez told him "to go get a knife from the kitchen," so O'Brien handed over the knife that was in his pocket. Mrs. Daher was "lying motionless face down by her bed" as Perez walked over and stabbed her "many times" with the knife "[a]ll over her body and her head and neck area." Perez later handed O'Brien his knife back.

The men found Mrs. Daher's SUV in the garage with the keys inside. Perez drove. The men drove toward Fairfield but then abandoned the vehicle and checked into the Overnighter Motel in Cordelia, where they split the stolen property. O'Brien cleaned the knife in the bathroom and later threw it in some bushes. They then went to the home of an acquaintance named Justin Mabra, where they did cocaine with Mabra and his girlfriend Megan McPhee. Soon their friend Jason Hart (the one who had introduced O'Brien and Snyder to Perez) picked the three of them up in his car. In the car with Hart was Deshawn Dawson. Hart drove the men to Snyder's home in San Francisco.

Mabra, McPhee, Dawson, and Hart all testified against Perez as well, corroborating several aspects of O'Brien's narrative. Mabra testified that he and McPhee encountered Perez, O'Brien, and Snyder in Fairfield in late March 1998, around the time of the murder. Mabra did not know Perez from before but identified him both at a live lineup and in court. McPhee also identified Perez both in a live lineup and in court. Dawson testified that he was in the car when Hart drove the men to San Francisco. Dawson told jurors that...

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