State v. Bailey, No. C4-02-835.
| Decision Date | 18 March 2004 |
| Docket Number | No. C4-02-835. |
| Citation | 677 N.W.2d 380 |
| Parties | STATE of Minnesota, Respondent, v. Billy Daymond BAILEY, Appellant. |
| Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
John M. Stuart, State Public Defender, Steven P. Russett, Assistant Public Defender, Minneapolis, MN, for appellant.
Mike Hatch, Attorney General, St. Paul, MN; and Amy Klobuchar, Hennepin County Attorney, Jean E. Burdorf, Assistant County Attorney, Thomas A. Weist, Assistant County Attorney, Minneapolis, MN, for respondent.
Heard, considered, and decided by the court en banc.
Appellant Billy Daymond Bailey was convicted of first-degree murder while committing criminal sexual conduct in connection with the May 1984 death of a 69-year-old neighborhood resident, Agnes Fafrowicz. On appeal to this court, he makes ten claims of error. Because prejudicial statements made by Bailey to police were erroneously admitted in evidence in violation of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), we reverse and remand to the district court for a new trial. To provide guidance for the new trial, we also address the other evidentiary issues that are likely to recur.
On Sunday, May 20, 1984, Virginia Golden entered the house of her mother, Agnes Fafrowicz, and discovered her mother's body on the living room floor. When police arrived, they found evidence that Fafrowicz had been robbed and sexually assaulted by someone who broke into her home. Investigators concluded that the crime had occurred on Wednesday, May 16. They took fluid samples from Fafrowicz's mouth, vagina and anus. Lab tests detected sperm in the vaginal sample.
On May 22, police learned that two checks "had come into the bank on Ms. Fafrowicz' account." When Detectives Ronald Snobeck and Robert Nelson acquired the checks, they saw that one of them, dated May 17, 1984, was made out to "Bill Vollmar-Bailey" for the sum of $230.00. The back of that check indicated that it had been cashed by Gopher Liquor, a store next to Bailey's apartment building.
While they were at Gopher Liquor questioning the store's owner, Detectives Snobeck and Nelson spotted Bailey walking across the adjacent parking lot and entering his apartment building. According to Detective Snobeck, when they saw him reemerge and begin walking toward the corner, the detectives returned to their car and drove close to Bailey, cutting off his path. The detectives exited the car, shouted to Bailey to stop and put his hands up, and approached him, one of them with his gun drawn and the other with his hand on his gun. They identified themselves as police, put Bailey against their car for a pat-down weapons search, handcuffed his hands behind his back and put him in the backseat of the car. The detectives interrogated Bailey in the car without providing any Miranda warning and then told him they would take him to the station.
At the station, the same two detectives continued to interrogate Bailey without providing any Miranda warning. Midway through the station interrogation, they read Bailey his Miranda rights.1
When the detectives testified at the hearing conducted on Bailey's motion to suppress both the warned and unwarned statements, neither of them provided any explanation of why they did not give a Miranda warning in the car or on arrival at the station. According to Detective Nelson, Bailey told the detectives in the car that Fafrowicz made out the check to him on May 18 for work that he had done on her lawn and the brakes of her car on the previous day. After they brought Bailey to the police station but before he was informed of his Miranda rights, he elaborated: he claimed that he had done "a brake job" on Fafrowicz's car on May 17, cut her grass on May 14, and at some point "cleaned up her battery posts on her car" and "cleaned the engine compartment up."
As the detectives realized, Bailey's story was riddled with doubtful assertions. Bailey claimed that Fafrowicz had written him the check on May 18, whereas there was considerable evidence that Fafrowicz had died on May 16. The detectives noticed several inaccuracies in Bailey's description of Fafrowicz's car and lawn mower, and they believed his claims to have cut her grass and cleaned her car battery to be demonstrably false.
The "culmination" of the police-station interrogation, according to the detectives, came when Bailey misidentified the side of Fafrowicz's car on which the battery was located. At this point, the detectives told Bailey that he was under arrest for murder, and Detective Nelson gave Bailey the standard Miranda warning.2 He agreed to waive his Miranda rights. The interrogation continued immediately, with no significant pause. Bailey largely recounted his story but added the further detail that he had arranged to paint Fafrowicz's house. Challenged by the officers to explain how Fafrowicz could write him a check on May 18, when she was already dead, Bailey responded, "That's a good question."
Bailey was charged under Minn.Stat. § 609.185(2) (1982)3 with first-degree murder while committing criminal sexual conduct. He was indicted on June 6, 1984. About 6 months later, the state dismissed the indictment under Minn. R.Crim. P. 30.01, stating:
[S]ince the Grand Jury indictment, all of the physical evidence has been processed by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension laboratory. The results of that examination tend to negate some of the evidence upon which the Grand Jury indicted this defendant. This recently obtained evidence makes it highly unlikely that this case could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
The state took no further action on the case for several years.
In February 1992, police lieutenant Brad Johnson, then head of the homicide division of the Minneapolis Police Department, authorized the destruction and release of several pieces of physical evidence relating to Fafrowicz's murder. Photographs and photocopies of some of the destroyed and released evidence (such as the $230 check) were retained. The district court later allowed trial witnesses to describe the destroyed evidence, and the court allowed the defense to attack the reliability of that testimony based on the fact that the underlying evidence had been destroyed.
When the case was reopened in 2000, investigators procured from the Medical Examiner's Office two slides that reportedly contained the vaginal and oral samples taken from Fafrowicz's body during the autopsy. Both slides were protected by cover slips that were adhered by a mounting medium. Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) scientist Catherine Knutson recognized that the tests she intended to perform on the DNA samples would exhaust those samples. She advised the prosecutor of this fact by letter approximately six weeks before the tests were performed, citing Minn. R.Crim. P. 9.01, subd. 1(4), and stating in part:
The prosecutor did not notify Bailey or his previously appointed attorney before Knutson performed the tests.
In October 2000, using a Profiler Plus kit, Knutson tested the samples against a blood sample taken from Bailey during the 1984 investigation. To gain access to the sample on the slides, Knutson applied heat to the slides with a Bunsen burner until the mounting medium began to boil. Bailey claims that this process was in violation of approved laboratory protocols and had not been the subject of any validation studies by the BCA. The vaginal sample yielded interpretable DNA results at six of the ten tested loci, including the amelogenin (the sex gene). The resulting profile matched the DNA from Bailey's blood sample. The Profiler Plus test exhausted the DNA sample. As a result, the BCA was not able to also test the sample with the Cofiler kit, which typically examines an additional three loci, and no sample was available for independent testing by Bailey.
With this new evidence, police once again charged Bailey with first-degree murder while committing criminal sexual conduct. A grand jury indicted him in December 2000. At that time, Bailey was serving time in federal prison in Oklahoma for unrelated offenses.
At trial, over Bailey's objections, the district court allowed the state to present (1) evidence regarding Bailey's inculpatory statements made after the Miranda warning; (2) witness testimony describing and drawing conclusions from the destroyed or released physical evidence; (3) testimony from Knutson and other state experts providing the results of the DNA testing; and (4) evidence of three subsequent burglaries committed by Bailey. On February 28, 2002, the jury found Bailey guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to a consecutive term of life imprisonment.4
On appeal to this court, Bailey makes ten claims of error, six of them concerning the DNA evidence that was introduced against him. First, he argues that the district court improperly admitted his inculpatory statements made during police interrogation after he was given the Miranda warning. Second, he complains that the court improperly allowed the prosecution to solicit testimony regarding the evidence that the state...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
State v. Ezeka, A18-0828
...was still in effect in January 2017. Second, he argued that his post- Miranda statements were inadmissible under State v. Bailey , 677 N.W.2d 380 (Minn. 2004). Third, he argued that his post- Miranda statements were involuntary. The district court denied the motion, and, on appeal, Ezeka ar......
-
State v. McMillan
...593, 601 (Fla.Dist.App.1997) (improper to compare the defendant's facts to specific facts in the O.J. Simpson case); State v. Bailey, 677 N.W.2d 380, 404 (Minn.2004) (improper to suggest that the government had put the defendant's DNA on incriminating evidence like it had done in the O.J. S......
-
State v. Holt
...has committed in taking a young man's life” is akin to asking the jury to administer justice for the victim. See State v. Bailey, 677 N.W.2d 380, 404 (Minn.2004) (prosecutor engaged in misconduct in murder trial by appealing to passion and prejudice of the jury when prosecutor said the Stat......
-
People v. Fountain
...derived from them, are credible. See, e.g., People v. Coy, 258 Mich.App. 1, 669 N.W.2d 831, 836 (2003) (five loci); State v. Bailey, 677 N.W.2d 380 (Minn.2004) (five loci plus sex gene). But a match does not conclusively identify a subject, even when every locus matches. See State v. Wright......