Porter v. State
| Decision Date | 25 October 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 1916, Sept. Term, 2013,1916, Sept. Term, 2013 |
| Citation | 230 Md.App. 288,148 A.3d 1 |
| Parties | Karla Louise Porter v. State of Maryland |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Argued by: Marta K. Kahn of Baltimore, MD, for Appellant.
Argued by: Brenda Gruss (Brian E. Frosh, Attorney General on the brief) all of Baltimore, MD, for Appellee.
After a six day jury trial in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County, Karla Louise Porter was convicted of first degree murder and related crimes. On appeal, she presents three issues, which we have reworded:
The State concedes that the trial court's instruction on imperfect self-defense was flawed. The State argues that the error was harmless because Ms. Porter was not entitled to the instruction in the first place. We believe that the State is correct. The trial court did not abuse its discretion when it declined to question the jurors individually about the contents of the note, nor did the court err when it denied Ms. Porter's motion to suppress her statement. We will affirm the convictions.
Because Ms. Porter does not challenge the legal sufficiency of the State's case against her, our summary of the facts will focus on the evidence relevant to her contentions on appeal.
During the early morning hours of March 1, 2010, William Raymond Porter was shot to death as he opened the Hess Gas Station that he owned and operated with his wife, Ms. Porter, in Baltimore County. Walter Bishop was the shooter. Bishop was a friend of Seamus Coyle , Ms. Porter's nephew. Coyle first introduced Bishop to Ms. Porter. Susan Datta , Ms. Porter's sister, Calvin Mowers , her brother, and Matthew Brown were also involved in the conspiracy to kill Mr. Porter.1 Bishop, Mowers, Coyle, Datta, and Brown were all prosecuted for their involvement in Mr. Porter's murder.
Ms. Porter testified at trial. She stated that her parents were separated when she was about six or seven years old and that, for several years thereafter, she lived with her mother and her mother's boyfriend. The boyfriend regularly physically and verbally abused her mother in Ms. Porter's presence and once pushed Ms. Porter into a hot stove, causing severe burns. Her mother did nothing about the incident and Ms. Porter went to live with her father when she was nine years old.
Ms. Porter testified that she met Mr. Porter in 1982 and that they married in 1986. Ms. Porter described controlling behavior on Mr. Porter's part from the outset of their relationship. She testified at length about numerous instances of physical, verbal, and psychological abuse, beginning early in their marriage and escalating, in severity and frequency, in the late 1990's and thereafter. For example, and this list is not all-inclusive, Ms. Porter testified that, during their marriage, her husband had: beaten her on her back and legs with a belt; on various occasions hit her with a rake, a board, his fists, and a tool box; stabbed her in the abdomen with a drill; pushed her head into a grave marker; smeared dog excrement on her; and threatened to kill her on several occasions, at least once while pointing a gun at her. Additionally, she testified that he repeatedly had made demeaning and derogatory statements to her about her appearance and her worth as a human being, and that he had harassed her at work, and forced her to stand at their kitchen sink and drink water until she urinated on herself.
Not all of this testimony was uncontested. Ms. Porter identified eyewitnesses to several incidents of abuse who were called by the State in rebuttal and testified that the incidents had never occurred in their presence. Moreover, her testimony as to Mr. Porter's abuse differed in some significant ways from what she had told her mental health professionals prior to trial.2 However, some of Ms. Porter's testimony was corroborated by the Porters' youngest child, Megan Porter. Megan testified that the environment in the family home was tense, and that Mr. Porter was regularly angry. She testified that her mother was submissive to her father's anger, and that Ms. Porter was frequently the target of Mr. Porter's frustrations. It was Megan's testimony that her father regularly yelled at her mother and called her demeaning and degrading names. Megan testified that, although she never saw her father strike her mother, she had seen her mother with bruises on her arms and legs, and at one point with a black eye.3
Ms. Porter testified to two instances of abuse in the “week or so” before Mr. Porter's death. The first arose out of Mr. Porter's desire to move to Florida—a source of tension in the parties' marriage, particularly in the year before Mr. Porter's death. Mr. Porter held a gun to Ms. Porter's head, and informed her that they would not be taking their children4 or his parents to Florida, when they moved. And then turned his attention to her, stating: In the second instance, Mr. Porter struck Ms. Porter across her back with a crutch because he did not find her degree of sympathy towards the fact that he was “bored” to be satisfactory. Ms. Porter testified that from June 2009 through March 1, 2010, she was “terrified almost on a daily basis.” She testified that during the period of late 2009 through March 2010:
In June 2009, that is, about nine months before Mr. Porter was murdered, Ms. Porter approached Daniel Blackwell, her daughter's boyfriend at the time, about killing Mr. Porter. Although they differed as to some of the specifics, both Ms. Porter and Blackwell testified that she offered him money to kill Mr. Porter, that he, at least initially, expressed an interest in doing so, but that he never followed through.5
Ms. Porter approached a second person—Tony Fails—in December 2009. Fails was a business associate of Mr. Porter's. He testified that he had no intention of participating in the crime, but did not refuse Ms. Porter's request. Instead, he told Ms. Porter that he would make some calls and get back to her. Ms. Porter called Mr. Fails throughout January 2010—by her own testimony, she called Mr. Fails frequently, sometimes several times a day—to see if he had found someone who was willing to kill Mr. Porter. Mr. Fails never made any phone calls on Ms. Porter's behalf. Ms. Porter stopped calling Fails towards the end of January 2010.
In the same month, Ms. Porter contacted Paige Huemann, who had lived with the Porters in 2007, about obtaining potassium cyanide so that she could poison Mr. Porter. Ms. Porter testified that Ms. Huemann did not provide her with any information as to obtaining poison.6
Ms. Porter testified that one of her nephews, Seamus Coyle,7 introduced her to Bishop during a meeting between herself and Coyle in a Walmart parking lot, in late January or early February 2010. Coyle had arranged to meet Ms. Porter because she had agreed to give Coyle money to make his mortgage payment. Bishop was seated in the passenger seat of the vehicle that Coyle was driving, and volunteered to kill Mr. Porter after listening to Ms. Porter describe Mr. Porter's abuse of her. Coyle testified that at that point Bishop exited the vehicle, walked toward the rear, and had a conversation with Ms. Porter. Coyle remained in the vehicle, but overheard something about $500, and it was his belief that telephone numbers were exchanged.
At a subsequent meeting in February 2010, Ms. Porter and Bishop finalized their agreement that Bishop would kill Mr. Porter and Ms. Porter gave Bishop the handgun that he would use to commit the murder. The handgun had been given to Ms. Porter by Susan Datta, her sister.
On the evening of February 28, 2010, the night before Mr. Porter was murdered, Ms. Porter and Bishop spoke by telephone and agreed that Bishop would arrive at the gas station in the early morning hours of March 1, 2010, and that he would shoot Mr. Porter before anybody else would be around. At around 2:30 a.m. on March 1, Ms. Porter, using her cell phone, called her home telephone and told her husband that the alarm company had called and told her that the security alarm had gone off at the gas station. Mr. Porter then prepared himself for the day and proceeded to the gas station. (Mr. Porter usually arrived at the gas station between 4:00 and 4:15 in the morning.)
After Mr. Porter left the house, Ms. Porter called her brother, Calvin Mowers, and arranged to have him drive Bishop to the gas station. Ms. Porter placed more than 50 calls from her cell phone to Bishop and Mowers between 2:30 am and 7:00 am on March 1, 2010. After leaving her home, Ms. Porter met Bishop, Mowers, and Matthew Brown at a McDonald's, where she confirmed that Bishop would follow through with the murder.
Ms. Porter then went to the Hess station. When she arrived, Mr. Porter was talking to a friend and she began taking inventory and performing other routine opening...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Porter v. State
...to an imperfect self-defense instruction, and thus any error in delivering such an instruction was harmless. Porter v. State , 230 Md.App. 288, 327–28, 148 A.3d 1 (2016). The intermediate appellate court explained, "There was certainly evidence from which the jury could have found that [ ] ......
-
Wallace-Bey v. State
...conclude that the court erred in this ruling or that Wallace–Bey suffered prejudice from it.12 Similarly in Porter v. State(Porter I), 230 Md.App. 288, 294–95, 148 A.3d 1 (2016), rev'd, 455 Md. 220, 166 A.3d 1044 (2017), this Court characterized evidence that a defendant's spouse not only b......
-
Porter v. State
...be entitled to an imperfect self-defense instruction, and thus any error in delivering such an instruction was harmless. Porter v. State, 230 Md. App. 288, 327-28 (2016). The intermediate appellate court explained, "There was certainly evidence from which the jury could have found that [ ] ......
-
Johnson v. State
...and, where successful, results in acquittal of the defendant. State v. Faulkner, 301 Md. 482, 485 (1984); accord Porter v. State, 230 Md. App. 288, 308 (2016). Imperfect self-defense is available where the defendant's "actual, subjective belief . . . that he/she is in apparent imminent dang......