People v. Wright
| Decision Date | 01 July 2015 |
| Citation | 37 N.E.3d 1127,16 N.Y.S.3d 485,2015 N.Y. Slip Op. 05621,25 N.Y.3d 769 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Howard S. WRIGHT, Appellant. |
| Court | New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
David M. Kaplan, Penfield, for appellant.
Sandra Doorley, District Attorney, Rochester (Geoffrey Kaeuper of counsel), for respondent.
We are presented in this appeal with a confluence of prosecutorial misconduct committed during closing argument, and a series of critical lapses by defense counsel when faced with the prosecutor's obvious transgressions from the leeway generally afforded attorneys during summation. As the record establishes, defense counsel failed to object, time and again, when the prosecutor repeatedly misrepresented to the jury critical DNA evidence as proof of defendant's guilt, in contradiction of the People's expert testimony. We conclude defense counsel was ineffective, and, on the record before us, defendant was denied a fair trial as a result. Therefore, the order of the Appellate Division should be reversed.
Defendant Howard Wright was tried and convicted of murder in the second degree. The People's case was circumstantial because there were no eyewitnesses to the crime and no forensic evidence that clearly established defendant's guilt. Other than testimony that placed defendant and others in the victim's company around the time of her death, and defendant's statement that he engaged in consensual sex with the victim, the People had no evidence that linked her to defendant. To meet the People's burden of proof, the prosecutor relied heavily on the results of DNA testing to connect defendant to the murder. However, the DNA analysis was also circumstantial because it did not “match” defendant's DNA to the DNA collected at the crime scene. Instead, the test only indicated that defendant could not be excluded from the pool of male DNA contributors, and the expert testimony provided no statistical comparison to measure the significance of those results.
Notwithstanding the known limitations of this DNA evidence and the indeterminate conclusions about the test results drawn by the People's own experts, the prosecutor in summation misrepresented the DNA analysis, including arguing the evidence established that defendant's DNA was at the crime scene and on a critical piece of evidence linked to the victim's murder. In light of the powerful influence of DNA evidence on juries, the opportunity for juror confusion regarding the limited probative value of the DNA methodology employed in this case, and the qualified nature of the test results, defense counsel's failure to object rendered him ineffective.
To understand the nature of the prosecutor's actions and the lack of any reasonable strategy for leaving the prosecutor's statements unchallenged, we begin our consideration of defendant's appeal with a review of the relevant trial evidence and the prosecutor's closing argument. Our legal analysis then focuses on the details of the summation and defense counsel's unexplained silence.
Defendant was tried in 2007 for the murder of the victim, a female drug user, who was found dead on a Rochester street on November 29, 1995. Defendant had been seen in the victim's company, in the hours before her murder, in the vicinity of a building associated with drug use.
According to a witness who knew defendant and had seen the victim “around” on prior occasions, she observed the victim in a car with three men, whom she identified as defendant, Christopher Gifford, and Keith Evans, between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. on November 28, 1995. She saw the car pull up to a building on North Clinton Avenue and drive away after Evans exited the car. She then saw defendant and Gifford the following morning, between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., as they exited through the back of the same building. This time she did not see the victim. Shortly after defendant walked out, she saw the victim's car pull out from the back of the building and drive past. Although she testified she did not see who was in the car, she assumed that it was defendant and Gifford because they were the only persons who exited through the back of the building to where she had observed the car was parked.
Evans testified and confirmed that he had been with the victim and defendant around the time of the murder. Evans, a drug dealer at the time, was a regular associate of defendant, and also knew the victim. He testified that, on November 28, he went to a building on Chamberlain Avenue, to sell cocaine. He found the victim with her baby, defendant, Gifford, and two other individuals, identified as brothers Freddy and Christopher Walker, in one of the apartments. He claimed that defendant and Gifford had sold drugs to the victim that day. At some point the victim left in her car and, between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m., returned without the baby. She again left the apartment, this time with Freddy, returning 45 to 60 minutes later. Between 5:00 and 7:30 p.m., the victim drove Evans, defendant, and Gifford to a tavern, where she and Evans spent approximately 15 minutes inside the tavern before she drove to the North Clinton Avenue building and dropped off Evans, somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. She then drove off with defendant and Gifford.
Evans further testified that, over the course of the next several hours, he saw defendant and Gifford together, but without the victim. Evans claimed that between 11:00 and 11:45 p.m. he was outside on the street near the North Clinton Avenue building, on his way to make a telephone call to the police on an unrelated matter, when he saw defendant and Gifford walking by.1 Evans also testified that he saw the victim's car in the alley next to the building where he had just seen defendant and Gifford.
Around 2:00 a.m., on November 29, he saw defendant and Gifford drive past in the car. Evans next saw defendant and Gifford a few hours later, between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., when he went inside one of the apartments in the North Clinton Avenue building looking for them believing they had taken his food. He found them sleeping in the apartment, and, after he woke them up, they exited the building and drove away in the victim's car.
Evans testified that he saw defendant a few days after he saw a newspaper reference to the victim. As they walked on the street defendant pointed out the victim's car, which was parked where the police subsequently found it. When Evans asked defendant about the victim, defendant told Evans that he and Gifford engaged in sex with her. Afterwards, defendant and Gifford dropped her off, and then Gifford dropped off defendant. Later Gifford told defendant where he left the victim's car. Evans described the location where the victim was dropped off as where “people that were doing the same thing they were doing.” On cross-examination, Evans suggested that she had been left with others who were “strung out on drugs.”
At approximately 9:00 a.m. on November 29, 1995, the victim was found lying in the driveway of a house, clothed but barefoot, with her hands bound by a shoelace behind her back, and with a shoelace tied around her neck as a ligature. A sock was found inside her clothing near her buttocks.
The police found the victim's car on November 30, 1995, near North Clinton Avenue, and discovered a pink sock inside, along with various baby items. The victim's hairs were found in the car as well as hair samples from both white and black individuals.
The medical examiner testified that the victim died as a result of asphyxia from ligature strangulation, with the approximate time of death between 11:30 p.m., on November 28, and 3:30 a.m. the day she was discovered. The body had abrasions under the chin and around the neck. The medical examiner also found two dark-colored hairs near the victim's external genitalia, later identified not to be the victim's.
Various physical evidence, including the hand and neck shoelace ligatures, vaginal swabs taken from the victim, a sperm sample taken on her panties, the two hairs, and an additional hair from the victim's mouth, was sent to an independent laboratory for further analysis. The results of the analysis were presented at trial through expert testimony.
The People presented testimony of three forensic experts to discuss the DNA evidence collected during the police investigation. The evidence included samples from the crime scene and the victim, and buccal swabs from the victim's husband, defendant, Evans, Gifford, and Christopher and Fred Walker.
One expert from the Monroe County Public Safety Laboratory explained DNA and DNA profiles, how DNA profiles are developed, and how DNA testing and analysis are used to compare an individual's DNA profile with the DNA profile of evidence obtained at a crime scene. She explained that because less than one percent of human DNA is different, DNA analysis looks at specific regions of DNA to identify where the DNA is different between individuals. In order to make comparisons, the analyst studies the different locations on DNA profiles to determine if the individual is a possible donor to the DNA from the crime scene. If there are differences on the locations, then the individual is excluded from the possible contributors to the DNA.
She testified that in 1995 when she was an Assistant Forensic Chemist for Monroe County, she examined swabs taken from the victim, which contained semen and sperm. Then in 2006, in her position as a Forensic Biologist, she examined ligatures from the victim's hands and neck. The DNA profile from the neck ligature only matched the victim. The DNA from the hand ligature was so low-level that she did not report that data. Instead, she sent the swabs from the ligatures to a private laboratory for additional testing, specifically Y chromosome or YSTR...
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