Riley v. State

• Decision Date: 25 October 2004
• Docket Number: No. S04P1039.,S04P1039.
• Citation: 604 S.E.2d 488,278 Ga. 677
• Parties: RILEY v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

604 S.E.2d 488

278 Ga. 677

RILEY v. The STATE.

No. S04P1039.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

October 25, 2004.

Reconsideration Denied November 11, 2004.

John T. Strauss, Monroe, for Appellant.

William Kendall Wynne, Jr., District Attorney, Thurbert E. Baker, Attorney General Mitchell P. Watkins, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

HINES, Justice.

A jury convicted William David Riley, Sr., of three counts of malice murder and two counts of first-degree arson. The murder victims were Riley's three young children. The jury recommended a death sentence for each murder after finding beyond a reasonable doubt seven statutory aggravating circumstances. OCGA § 17-10-30(b)(2), (7). The trial court denied Riley's motion for new trial, and he appeals. We affirm the convictions and sentences. ¹ 1. The evidence presented at trial showed the following: at approximately 10:45 a.m. on August 16, 2000, a fire broke out in a trailer at the Pine Valley Mobile Home Park. The trailer was rented by Riley, who lived there with his girlfriend, Jacque, and his three children, 6-year-old Ashley, 5-year-old William, and 3-year-old Samantha. Riley's friend, Wayne Atnip, was also living there and sleeping on a couch. All three adults escaped the fire. All three children died.

Neighbors and firefighters reported odd behavior by Riley during the fire. They testified that he did not try to save his children and that his demeanor was cold, unemotional, and dry. While the trailer was burning, and before the firefighters arrived, he ran to the back of the trailer, yelled for his children to awake, banged on the outside wall a few times, and then moved his car away from the trailer. He was the only adult who escaped the fire fully dressed. He had some ash and soot on his face and in his nose, but no burns on his hands, arms or anywhere on his body.

Witnesses testified that Riley rarely interacted with the children and had used derogatory names when referring to them. He had made threats to kill them to a prior girlfriend if she called the Department of Family and Children Services ("DFACS"). Riley's wife, the mother of the victims, moved out in May 2000 and Riley was in dire financial straits. He had been denied welfare benefits and was facing eviction; the eviction hearing had been scheduled for August 18. A neighbor heard Riley tell Jacque that he would kill the children before he would let DFACS take them. He also said he would burn the trailer before he would be evicted. In an argument with Jacque three days before the fire, another neighbor heard Riley say he wished Jacque and the children were dead. Neighbors also testified that Riley and Jacque had a loud argument outside the trailer a few hours before the fire started.

One of the firefighters at the scene of the fire asked Riley if the children could have obtained a cigarette lighter and Riley insisted that was not possible because "we keep them put up." Riley suggested a short circuit as the fire's possible cause. The police tape-recorded an interview with Riley at the scene in which he said that he had been facing eviction because he had refused to pay his rent due to the trailer's electrical problems, including exposed wires and cracked light fixtures. He said the adults had awakened that morning too late to go to work so everyone but he had gone back to sleep. Riley drank coffee and read; his children woke up and he fed them and then sent them back to their room to play. He went to the children's room at 10:30 a.m. and told them to get dressed. There were no interior doors in the trailer, except one to the bathroom. Riley and Jacque had tacked a sheet over the doorway to the master bedroom. He went to the master bedroom and dressed; Jacque was just waking up. As he was putting on his second boot, he heard 3-year-old Samantha scream, "Daddy, help me!" He ran into the hallway and saw smoke. He went to the doorway of the children's bedroom and saw flames on the far wall of the room behind his son's bed. The children's room had two twin-sized beds that filled almost the entire room; the room was 9' 1" by 7' 8" and the corner of the nearest bed was only 2.5 feet from the entrance to the room. Riley, who is 6' 5" tall, said he could not see his children through the smoke so he reached into the room and stepped on a bed to try to reach them. He was unable to do this because the heat was too intense, so he went outside, picked up a piece of wood, and threw it through the children's window. He knew it was over when the screaming stopped and flames started coming out the window. He then moved his car because he was afraid it might explode.

A state arson investigator concluded that the fire had been intentionally set; it had started in the children's bedroom near the center of the trailer, exited this room, and traveled down the hall to the living room. No cigarette lighter was found in the children's room, where the three bodies were discovered. The investigator found no problems with the electrical system; electrical shorts will melt wire with a "beading" effect similar to the effect of welding on metal but no such beading of the wires in the trailer was found. He also found no problems with the electrical appliances. An electrician who inspected the trailer for the county in May 2000, just before Riley moved in, agreed that the wiring was not defective and that almost all the light fixtures had been recently replaced. The landlord and the mobile home park maintenance worker testified that Riley had never complained about any electrical problems or faulty wiring in his trailer. The police found a cigarette lighter on the ground eight feet from the trailer.

On the night of August 16, Riley drove to the sheriff's office for another audiotaped interview. When a GBI agent confronted him with his belief that Riley was not telling the truth about the fire, Riley stated, "My son plays with lighters. Okay?" Riley said he left a lighter out that he thought was empty and that his son must have found it, shook it, and started the fire in the children's room. He also asserted that he was asleep when the fire started and he first heard Samantha screaming, but the agent reminded him that he had earlier said he was getting dressed. When the agent pointed out that Riley said he had gone into the children's small bedroom to try to save them, but that his arm hair was not even singed, Riley then said he had not gone into their room. Eventually, Riley admitted that, while the children were sleeping and to scare Jacque, he used a cigarette lighter to set fire to the bedding on the corner of his son's bed. When he returned to the children's room two or three minutes later, he saw that his son had jumped to the girls' bed "and they started coughing and hacking and everything else and the heat from that fire just got 'em."

The evidence was sufficient to enable a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt Riley guilty of three counts of malice murder, three counts of felony murder, and two counts of arson in the first degree. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). The trial court did not err by denying Riley's motion for a directed verdict of acquittal. See Raulerson v. State, 268 Ga. 623(1), 491 S.E.2d 791 (1997); OCGA § 17-9-1(a). The evidence was also sufficient to authorize the jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of the statutory aggravating circumstances which support his death sentences for the malice murders. Jackson v. Virginia, supra; OCGA § 17-10-35(c)(2).

2. Riley claims that his death sentences must be vacated because the State did not allege in the indictment the statutory aggravating factors that supported them. This Court has decided this issue adversely to him. Terrell v. State, 276 Ga. 34(5), 572 S.E.2d 595 (2002).

3. Riley's second statement was not the product of an illegal arrest nor was it involuntary. Riley drove to the sheriff's office on August 16 and agreed to be interviewed. The police read him his Miranda (v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966)) rights and he executed a written waiver of them. Riley was 31 years old, has an eleventh grade education, and has average intelligence. He was lucid, sober, and appeared to understand his rights and the waiver. The interview lasted less than two hours and was audiotaped. His incriminating statement was reduced to writing and he signed each page. The evidence shows that Riley was free to leave until he admitted setting the fire that killed his children. Although the interview became confrontational and the officers repeatedly accused Riley of lying, they neither made threats nor promises to him. They did suggest to Riley that Jacque had "dumped it on poor old Bill," which was not true, but this suggestion was not calculated to produce an untruthful response. See DeYoung v. State, 268 Ga. 780(8), 493 S.E.2d 157 (1997); State v. Ritter, 268 Ga. 108(1), 485 S.E.2d 492 (1997). In fact, the officers spent a considerable portion of their questioning trying to convince Riley to incriminate Jacque, but in the end he only incriminated himself. The officers' bluff that scientific evidence would tell them exactly what happened in the trailer also did not make Riley's statement inadmissible, even considering that they admitted at the pretrial hearing that they had overstated their investigative capability. See id. Considering the totality of the circumstances, we conclude that the trial court did not err by finding that Riley's second statement to the police was voluntary and admissible. See Lee v. State, 270 Ga. 798(2), 514 S.E.2d 1 (1999); DeYoung, supra; OCGA § 24-3-50.

4. Riley alleges that the trial court erred by limiting the testimony of Dr. Stark, a psychologist called to testify by Riley, regarding Riley's susceptibility to giving a false confession due to the police interrogation technique utilized. Dr. Stark...