State v. Boobar
| Citation | 637 A.2d 1162 |
| Parties | STATE of Maine v. Ronald W. BOOBAR, Jr. |
| Decision Date | 01 March 1994 |
| Court | Supreme Judicial Court of Maine (US) |
Michael E. Carpenter, Atty. Gen., Charles K. Leadbetter (orally), Asst. Atty. Gen., Augusta, for the State.
Martha Harris (orally), Paine, Lynch & Harris, Bangor, for defendant.
Before WATHEN, C.J., and GLASSMAN, CLIFFORD, COLLINS, RUDMAN and DANA, JJ.
Ronald W. Boobar, Jr. appeals from a judgment entered in the Superior Court (Somerset County, Smith, J.) on a jury verdict finding him guilty of murder, 17-A M.R.S.A. § 201(1)(A) (1983). Boobar challenges the admissibility of his statement to police, of evidence relating to a demonstration videotaped at the crime scene, of evidence concerning a comparison of footprints found on the victim's body and on Boobar's car with prints made by Boobar's sneakers, of testimony relating to conversations Boobar had with fellow members of Alcoholics Anonymous, of evidence that the victim had sexual intercourse near the time of her death, and of evidence of a prior consistent statement. Boobar also argues that the trial court erred in excluding evidence he proffered seeking to implicate an alternative perpetrator, and he challenges the sufficiency of the evidence generally. Finding no reversible error, and concluding that the evidence is sufficient to sustain the conviction, we affirm.
At the trial, the jury heard evidence that on November 9, 1988, two passersby discovered the body of 14-year-old Rebecca Pelkey of Bangor in the woods along a tote road in Hermon. A state medical examiner determined that Rebecca had died of strangulation from a nylon rope that had been wound around her neck six times. The medical examiner estimated that Rebecca had been dead for between five and ten days at the time her body was discovered. Her mother testified that she had not seen Rebecca for nine days when notified of her daughter's death.
Thomas Dembowsky, a friend and coworker of Boobar, testified that on an evening in early November 1988, he and Boobar left a Bangor bar in Boobar's car while in the company of three teenaged girls, one of whom Boobar referred to as "Becky." According to Dembowsky, Boobar had volunteered to let Becky drive his car, and Boobar had asked her whether she had a boyfriend. The two friends of Rebecca's who were riding with her that evening also testified, indicating that the evening involved a joyride around various locations in Bangor, the drinking of vodka and orange juice, followed by Boobar dropping off everyone except Rebecca. One of the friends also testified that on the weekend following this incident, she let herself in the home that Rebecca shared with her mother, and received a telephone call from someone she thought was Rebecca, asking for a ride home for her and her mother.
When the State Police identified Boobar as the man who had last been seen with Rebecca, detectives immediately went to his home in Bangor, at approximately midnight of the day following the discovery of Rebecca's body. Boobar agreed to the detectives' request for an interview at the nearby Bangor Police Station; the taped interrogation lasted approximately four hours. Boobar repeatedly denied that he had killed Rebecca, maintaining that he had dropped her off at her home on the night in question.
The grand jury returned an indictment charging Boobar with murder, and he was arrested and held without bail at the Penobscot County Jail. A fellow inmate, Charles Kimball, Jr., testified that he overheard Boobar at the jail telling someone on the telephone that A second inmate, Richard Everett, Jr., told the jury that Boobar admitted to him and another inmate that he had killed Rebecca. While at the jail, Boobar also met with Daniel DesIsles, who conducted meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) at the lockup. DesIsles testified that Boobar confessed his guilt to him during a conversation.
Following a hearing, the court (Beaulieu, J.) denied Boobar's motion to suppress his statement to the police. After a subsequent hearing, the court (Smith, J.) transferred venue to Somerset County, but denied Boobar's motion in limine to exclude testimony regarding the statements Boobar made to DesIsles and another AA member with whom Boobar had attended an AA meeting prior to his arrest. Boobar filed this appeal after being convicted following a jury trial.
Boobar concedes that he was advised of his rights as required by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), and does not argue that those rights were not knowingly waived. In order to be admissible, however, a statement must be voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt. State v. Curtis, 552 A.2d 530, 532 (Me.1988); State v. Larrivee, 479 A.2d 347, 349 (Me.1984); Me. Const. art. I, § 6. "A statement is voluntary if 'it results from the free choice of a rational mind, if it is not the product of coercive police conduct, and if under all of the circumstances, its admission would be fundamentally fair.' " Curtis, 552 A.2d at 532 (quoting State v. Mikulewicz, 462 A.2d 497, 501 (Me.1983)). In order to be voluntary, a statement must be the result of a defendant's exercise of his or her own free will and rational intellect. State v. Caouette, 446 A.2d 1120, 1123 (Me.1982).
We review a trial court's determination on voluntariness for clear error, and we will not overturn a finding of voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt if the evidence rationally supports that determination. Larrivee, 479 A.2d at 349. The State bears the burden of establishing voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt, but the trial court should look to the totality of the circumstances in making its determination as to the admissibility of an accused's statement to police. State v. Smith, 615 A.2d 1162, 1163 (Me.1992).
Boobar maintains that his exhaustion and emotional state during the interrogation (the statement was obtained late at night, at a police station, over a four-hour period), his ignorance of the fact that he was the prime suspect (the police did not inform him that he was a suspect in a homicide, telling him that the case involved a missing person), and the tactics used by the detectives (they used "good cop-bad cop" interviewing techniques and were not fully candid about the nature of their investigation at first, indicating only that they were seeking information about a missing person, disclosing later that they were investigating Pelkey's murder and that Boobar was a suspect) required the trial court to conclude that in the totality of the circumstances his statement was not voluntary. We disagree. There were three breaks during the interview, and opportunities for Boobar to drink coffee and make bathroom visits. The detectives advised Boobar that he could stop if he were too tired to continue the interview; Boobar assured them he was not too fatigued. Notwithstanding Boobar's fatigue, he was calm and lucid, State v. Carisio, 552 A.2d 23, 25 (Me.1988), and any confrontational aspects of the interrogation did not render his statement involuntary. State v. Candage, 549 A.2d 355, 359-60 (Me.1988); see also State v. Scheuler, 488 A.2d 481, 484 (Me.1985). Moreover, in the absence of evidence suggesting that the police were abusive or hostile, the fact that the interrogation lasted several hours does not mean that the statements were involuntary. See State v. Gosselin, 594 A.2d 1102, 1105 (Me.1991). On this record, the trial court's finding that Boobar's statement was voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt was not clearly erroneous. See State v. Barczak, 562 A.2d 140, 145 (Me.1989).
During their investigation, and with Boobar's permission, the State Police took custody of Boobar's car. They pinpointed a dent on the vehicle's left-side mirror and hypothesized that this dent might correspond to a fresh-appearing gouge they had discovered in a tree beside the tote road near the crime scene. The investigators also found particles of black paint in the tree, noting that the mirror had a dent in the bottom left-hand corner from which some black paint had apparently been scraped off. The tree in question was a balsam fir; particles of vegetative matter found on the mirror proved to be not inconsistent with balsam fir. The investigators cut down the tree and took it to the State Police crime lab for analysis. The detectives then took the car to the scene, moved the vehicle into the position indicated by tire tracks they had identified there, replaced a four-foot section of the tree with the gouge in it on the stump from which it had been cut, and drove the car past the tree stump while videotaping the proceedings. At the trial, over Boobar's objection, the State introduced evidence of this demonstration, including the videotape, to suggest to the jury that it had been Boobar's car that had caused the gouge in the tree.
Boobar argues that the admission of this evidence was error, maintaining that pursuant to M.R.Evid. 403, the danger of creating unfair prejudice to the defendant outweighed any probative value, and that the testimony concerning the demonstration was inadmissible pursuant to the standard for expert testimony articulated in M.R.Evid. 702. 1 We review a trial court's evidentiary rulings for clear error or an abuse of discretion. State v. Schuman, 622 A.2d 716, 718 (Me.1993).
The results of an evidentiary experiment such as the one at issue here are admissible if the experiment is conducted under circumstances that bear a substantial similarity to those surrounding the event at issue. State v. Hardy, 489 A.2d 508, 511 (Me.1985). Even experiments that are not entirely similar to the event in question may be "enlightening" to the jury; variations between the experimental and actual conditions go to the weight rather than the admissibility...
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