People v. Williams
| Decision Date | 05 December 2016 |
| Docket Number | S131819 |
| Citation | 1 Cal.5th 1166,384 P.3d 1162,211 Cal.Rptr.3d 1 |
| Court | California Supreme Court |
| Parties | The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. George WILLIAMS, Jr., Defendant and Appellant. |
Paul J. Spiegelman, under appointment by the Supreme Court, for Defendant and Appellant.
Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General, Julie L. Garland, Assistant Attorney General, Holly D. Wilkens, Theodore M. Cropley and Scott C. Taylor, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
A 2004 jury convicted defendant of the 1986 first degree murder of 14-year-old Rickie Ann Blake (Rickie). It found true the special circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a kidnapping, and murder during the commission of a rape. (Pen. Code, §§ 187, 190.2, subd. (a)(17)(B) & (C).)1 The jury also found defendant guilty of forcible rape and kidnapping. (§§ 261, subd. (a)(2), 207, subd. (a).) Defendant admitted a prior serious felony conviction. (§§ 667, subd. (a), 1192.7, subd. (a).) After a penalty trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. On February 24, 2005, the court denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict (§ 190.4) and entered the death judgment. This appeal is automatic. (§ 1239, subd. (b).) The judgment is affirmed in its entirety.
Rickie was in the eighth grade in 1986; she was less than five feet tall and weighed 120 pounds. She lived with her parents and older sister "Bootsie" on Oleander Avenue in Chula Vista. Rickie's older brother, Bobby, was overseas in the armed forces. Rickie was shy and afraid of the dark; she would not answer the door for anyone she did not know. She never drank and would not leave the house alone at night. She played with her Cabbage Patch dolls and was not allowed to date. Rickie had a "boyfriend," Henry L., an eighth grader who attended a nearby school. They spoke often on the phone, but had never kissed. She had no interest in other boys. Rickie and her best friend, Kristin, wrote letters to each other talking about "girl stuff."
One night, around 10:00 p.m., a man named George called asking for Rickie. Bootsie's friend, Angela Caruso, who took the call and thought the caller sounded like an adult, told him that he should not be calling a girl Rickie's age, and hung up on him.
On April 10, 1986, the day before Rickie was murdered, her father picked her up from school to take her to the dentist. When they returned home that evening, Rickie complained that her teeth hurt. She had soup and ice cream for dinner and took some aspirin to relieve her tooth pain. When her parents went to bed at around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. that night, Rickie was watching a San Diego Padres baseball game on television. Her parents' bedroom door was closed. Bootsie and her two girlfriends returned home at around 10:30 p.m. and went outside with Rickie to talk. The girlfriends left, and Rickie and Bootsie went inside again. Rickie was talking on the phone to Henry L. and Kristin on a three-way call. Bootsie locked the front and back doors and asked Rickie to get off the phone. Rickie hung up the phone and brought it to Bootsie in her bedroom. Around 11:00 or 11:30 p.m., the phone rang. Bootsie answered, and a man named George again asked for Rickie. He was not George Bell, their neighbor. Rickie retrieved the phone to take the call and returned to her bedroom with the phone. Bootsie fell asleep.
The next morning, Mrs. Blake woke up around 5:00 a.m. and found the front door open. The lights and the television were on. Rickie's shoes were near the front door, and she had not slept in her bedroom. Her Cabbage Patch dolls had not been changed into their pajamas, something Rickie did every night. The Blakes called neighbors and friends and then the police. Mr. Blake drove around looking for Rickie.
That same evening, after 10:00 p.m., a motorist found Rickie's body on the Main Street off-ramp of Interstate 15 in San Diego County. Rickie was lying on her back; her face had been beaten. She had bruising around her left eye and cheek and slight bruising on her chin and lip. She was wearing a pink sweatshirt, black pants, and dirty socks; she was not wearing shoes. There were bloodstains on Rickie's sweatshirt collar, on the white tank top she wore underneath the sweatshirt, and on her bra straps. Her black pants and underpants had the odor of urine. It appeared that Rickie had not been killed where her body was found.
Near Rickie's body, police discovered two footprints and two beer cans. No fingerprints could be recovered from the beer cans. In the roadway, police discovered tracks from the rear wheels of a truck and a series of droplets that appeared to be fluid from a vehicle. Forensic testing could not determine whether the droplets were transmission fluid or motor oil.
Angela Cardenas, Rickie's friend, identified a photograph of defendant, an African-American male, as a person she had seen at Skateland, a Chula Vista skating rink where Rickie sometimes roller skated and that Bootsie frequented. Bootsie also identified defendant as a person she had seen at the skating rink. In 1986, both the owner of the rink and a longtime employee identified a photo of defendant as someone who looked familiar to them. The owner did not know Rickie, but knew Bootsie.
The employee did not personally know Rickie or her sister and could not identify anyone in the courtroom, but he testified that he believed he had seen a person pictured in a photo exhibit standing outside the rink. The person in the picture was Augustus Salton, a security guard for the rink, who identified a photo of defendant as a person he had seen standing or walking around outside the rink in 1986. Defendant was a good roller skater and went to the skating rink regularly.
On April 12, 1986, Dr. John Eisele performed Rickie's autopsy. He found light linear marks above Rickie's breasts, indicating that something was pressed up against the upper area of her chest when lividity was forming. Rickie's tank top and bra were both pulled above her breasts, which accounted for the light linear marks. Rickie's left eyelid was swollen and bruised from blunt trauma, like a punch, and there was bruising in the inside lining of the eyelids of both eyes. The bruising in the right eye was consistent with trauma to the eye or squeezing of the neck that collapsed the jugular vein. The trauma to the mouth was consistent with injuries caused by a beverage bottle. On the left side of Rickie's neck, beneath her chin, there was some bruising and a small scrape; there was also a small linear scrape on the left side of her neck. Pressure or squeezing, rather than a blow, would have caused these neck injuries. Hemorrhaging was found on her forehead area, and the injuries indicated three separate impacts from a blow or object that could have caused unconsciousness. The blunt object was either a fist or a board. The hemorrhaging could also have resulted from her head being slammed down on a hard flat surface. The soft tissue of Rickie's neck showed several areas of hemorrhage, consistent with her neck being squeezed by hands, a ligature, or some other item.
Dr. Eisele observed no injuries or abnormalities in Rickie's genital exam. He did see spermatozoa heads on a microscopic slide from a swab taken from Rickie's vagina. The heads alone without the tails meant the sperm had started to degenerate. Dr. Eisele estimated the time of Rickie's death to be between 1:00 a.m. on April 11 to between 12 and 24 hours before Rickie's autopsy on April 12. He estimated that the sperm had been deposited between 48 to 72 hours before Rickie's death. Rickie had a .04 blood-alcohol level that could have been due to a combination of alcohol ingestion and decomposition, although on cross-examination at trial Dr. Eisele admitted that in December 2003, and again in September 2004, he had concluded that the alcohol was attributable to decomposition, not consumption. He also concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation
, although he noted that death by suffocation was also a possibility.
Dr. Glenn Wagner had been the San Diego County Medical Examiner for 14 months at the time of defendant's trial. He reviewed the materials in the coroner's case file, including Dr. Eisele's autopsy findings and the investigative report. Dr. Wagner opined that Rickie's death occurred in the morning hours of April 11, 1986, between midnight and 9:00 a.m. He observed that Rickie's bra was displaced at or close to the time of her death. The injuries to her mouth, fluid he found in her lungs, and the .04 blood-alcohol level in the vitreous humour were consistent with her being force-fed alcohol that went into her lungs. Dr. Wagner concluded that the cause of Rickie's death was manual strangulation, and the bruising on her neck and face occurred before her death. He also noted that the fluid in her lungs suggested drowning as a contributing factor.
In contrast to Dr. Eisele's original testimony, Dr. Wagner saw an intact sperm present on a slide made from the swabs of Rickie's vagina, and concluded she was sexually assaulted. Dr. Wagner opined that the sexual assault occurred within 24 hours of the slide preparation. He testified that the average intact sperm could last post mortem for 23 hours, but could last longer if the victim's body was refrigerated. He opined that sperm with heads alone could last 96 hours after the victim's death, with an average lifetime of 38.4 hours. He also testified that Rickie's blood-alcohol level was due in part to ingestion and in part from decomposition. He noted that Rickie had still not had her first period.
Although deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing did not exist in 1986, such testing was conducted in 2002 and 2003 on Rickie's pants and the underpants she was wearing when found. The tests were positive for sperm and showed one donor. A reference sample from defendant was tested in ...
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