State v. Cruthirds
| Decision Date | 26 June 2014 |
| Docket Number | Docket No. And–13–421. |
| Citation | 2014 ME 86,96 A.3d 80 |
| Parties | STATE of Maine v. Cleveland O. CRUTHIRDS. |
| Court | Maine Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Lauren Wille, Esq. (orally), DeGrinney Law Offices, Portland, for appellant Cleveland Cruthirds.
Andrew P. Matulis, Asst. Dist. Atty. (orally), Androscoggin County DA's Office, Auburn, on the briefs and argued, for appellee State of Maine.
Panel: SAUFLEY, C.J., and ALEXANDER, SILVER, MEAD, GORMAN, and JABAR, JJ.
[¶ 1] Cleveland O. Cruthirds appeals from a judgment of conviction entered by the trial court ( Clifford, J.) following a jury verdict finding him guilty of elevated aggravated assault (Class A), 17–A M.R.S. § 208-B(1)(A) (2013); burglary (Class B), 17–A M.R.S. § 401(1)(B)(4) (2013); and violation of a condition of release (Class E), 15 M.R.S. § 1092(1)(A) (2013). Cruthirds contends that the court erred in (1) admitting in evidence a witness's videotaped interview with police as a recorded recollection pursuant to M.R. Evid. 803(5); (2) excluding evidence of an alternative suspect; (3) imposing an insufficient sanction on the State for a discovery violation; (4) declining to instruct the jury that it could infer that evidence destroyed by the State was favorable to Cruthirds; and (5) declining to allow Cruthirds to play a 911 tape during his initial cross-examination of a police detective. Cruthirds also contends that the State's destruction of potential DNA evidence in the form of some of the victim's bloody clothing, and its failure to preserve certain witness statements, violated his right to due process and deprived him of a fair trial. We affirm the judgment.
[¶ 2] The record, viewed in the light most favorable to the jury's verdict, supports the following facts. See State v. Diana, 2014 ME 45, ¶ 2, 89 A.3d 132. The victim had an on-and-off dating and sexual relationship with Cruthirds beginning in August 2011. On November 23, 2011, after the victim asked Cruthirds to leave her apartment, he smashed her TV and assaulted her. Police were called and a bail condition was imposed barring Cruthirds from having any contact with the victim. On December 2, police officers performing a domestic violence check discovered Cruthirds with the victim at her apartment and arrested him for violating his bail conditions. He was incarcerated until December 7, when he returned to the apartment with a police officer to retrieve his belongings. Some time after that, Cruthirds and the victim again had contact.
[¶ 3] On December 10, after a night of drinking, the victim went to bed around 7:00 a.m. and got up again at around 5:00 p.m. She called her friend Karie Lessard and asked her to come over. Lessard arrived and the two women sat on the victim's bed smoking cigarettes. Cruthirds's ring and bracelet, which had not been returned to him with the rest of his property, were on the nightstand. The victim was engaged in a Facebook conversation with, and talking to Lessard about, “Deshawn,” a man with whom she had had a relationship in the past and who was the father of her child. She also talked to Lessard about pawning the ring and bracelet.
[¶ 4] As the victim and Lessard talked, the bedroom door flew open to reveal Cruthirds standing in the doorway. He had a “[v]ery blank” affect and accused the victim of cheating on him. The victim testified that the next thing she remembered was Lessard screaming, “he has a knife,” and Cruthirds stabbing her repeatedly in the head. The trauma surgeon who operated on the victim that night reported treating twenty-one stab wounds. The victim spent the next six days at Central Maine Medical Center. At the time of the trial she continued to suffer from complete deafness in her right ear, significant nerve damage to her face, and significant weakness in her right arm. When she returned to her apartment after being discharged from the hospital, Cruthirds's ring and bracelet were gone from her nightstand. During her trial testimony, the victim positively identified Cruthirds as her assailant.
[¶ 5] Although the victim did not remember making a call to 911, a tape of a 911 call was admitted in evidence and played for the jury; the victim identified the voices on the tape as hers and Cruthirds's. At the beginning of the call, the victim calmly told the dispatcher that Cruthirds was in her house, that he had a bail condition not to be there, and that she did not know how he got in. She identified Cruthirds by name and spelled his last name. She addressed a man who can be heard in the background as “Cleveland.” The man can be heard saying, “you just cheated on me,” and “Deshawn, Deshawn, Deshawn, Deshawn, Deshawn.” Just after the victim said, “You know you're going to jail, you're not supposed to have any contact with me,” she told the dispatcher that “[h]e's grabbing a fucking knife right now,” and then began to scream continuously.
[¶ 6] As she did at a pretrial hearing, Lessard testified at trial that she did not remember anything about the day the victim was attacked. Over Cruthirds's objection, the court, pursuant to M.R. Evid. 803(5),1 admitted a videotape of Lessard's interview with Detective Lee Jones of the Lewiston Police Department that was conducted on the night of the attack. In that interview, Lessard told Jones that Cruthirds, whom she knew and identified by name, was apparently hiding in the victim's apartment before he kicked open the bedroom door and told the victim, “I knew you were cheating on me.” Lessard said that when the victim grabbed her phone, Cruthirds went into the kitchen, found a black-handled knife, and returned to the bedroom with the knife in his pocket. Lessard told Jones that she saw Cruthirds raise the knife as if to stab the victim. The victim began screaming and Lessard ran to an upstairs neighbor's apartment on the third floor to summon help; she could hear the victim still screaming from her first floor apartment.
[¶ 7] A neighbor on the third floor of the victim's building testified that at about 8:47 p.m. she heard screaming from a lower floor and a female voice saying, “He's killing me.” Lessard appeared outside the neighbor's door yelling to be let in, and that “[the victim] was being killed.” Lessard “was in a total panic and just screaming that [the victim's] ex-boyfriend was killing her and ... to call 9–1–1.” The neighbor called police.
[¶ 8] The first officer arrived within one minute of receiving a bail violation complaint at 8:48 p.m. He heard screaming from an upper floor, saw a significant amount of blood, and located the badly bleeding victim on a fourth floor landing. She was “hysterical,” and when the officer asked her who injured her, “[s]he had stated the name Cleveland Cruthirds.” A sergeant who soon responded thought the victim would die of her injuries. When he asked her who had attacked her, “she said Cleveland and I said Cleveland who and she said Cleveland Cruthirds.”
[¶ 9] Cruthirds was arrested on Horton Street in Lewiston just after midnight. In a videotaped interview with Detective Jones shortly thereafter, he acknowledged that the victim was his ex-girlfriend, but he denied being at her apartment that night. Jones testified that at one point he asked Cruthirds about several small cuts on his hand; Cruthirds initially denied having any cuts but then said they were caused by glass. When Jones left the room, Cruthirds began licking his hand at the site of the cuts. Later, with Jones still out of the room, Cruthirds took a ring out of his pocket and wiped it on his pants, then put it on and began licking it.
[¶ 10] A forensic DNA analyst with the State Police crime laboratory testified that blood taken from grooves in the ring was a mixture that could have been contributed by the victim and Cruthirds; one in 317,000 Caucasians was a potential contributor to the mixture, as was one in 42,600 African–Americans.2 DNA extracted from blood found on Cruthirds's elbow and jeans matched the victim's DNA. The analyst also examined selected cuttings from the shirt the victim was wearing, and testified that at some sites she found prostate specific antigen (PSA) that did not come from Cruthirds, indicating that the victim's shirt at some unknown time had contact with two unidentified males. Although PSA is a component of semen, the analyst could not say that it came from semen in this case because no sperm cells were found; the PSA could have come from blood, saliva, skin, or some other source.
[¶ 11] Cruthirds was indicted in February 2012. At a two-day hearing in which it considered several motions, the trial court ruled, relevant to this appeal, that (1) the State's destruction of certain articles of the victim's bloody clothing early in the investigation did not warrant suppression of all DNA evidence in the case, (2) Cruthirds had failed to present a sufficient foundation to introduce evidence of an alternative suspect, and (3) Lessard's videotaped interview with Jones was admissible as a recorded recollection pursuant to Rule 803(5).
[¶ 12] The case went to trial in August 2013. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty on a charge of attempted murder and verdicts of guilty on elevated aggravated assault, burglary, and violating a condition of release. The court dismissed two other counts. At a sentencing hearing, the court entered judgment and imposed a sentence for elevated aggravated assault of twenty-eight years' imprisonment, with all but twenty-two years suspended, and four years of probation; it also imposed concurrent sentences of five years for burglary and six months for violation of bail conditions.
[¶ 13] This appeal followed.
[¶ 14] Cruthirds advances several grounds that he contends require us to vacate the judgment. We address his arguments in turn.
[¶ 15] At the pretrial hearing, Karie Lessard professed a total lack of memory concerning the...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
State v. Wai Chan
...333 ; Trombetta , 467 U.S. at 481-83, 487-88, 488 n.7, 104 S.Ct. 2528 ; see also, e.g. , Cote , 2015 ME 78, ¶ 4, 118 A.3d 805 ; State v. Cruthirds , 2014 ME 86, ¶ 27, 96 A.3d 80 ; State v. St. Louis , 2008 ME 101, ¶ 3, 951 A.2d 80. When presented with allegations that the government failed ......
-
State v. Daly
...the victim's remains in a stream. Jaime , 2015 ME 22, ¶ 36, 111 A.3d 1050.[¶32] In contrast, in other cases such as State v. Cruthirds , 2014 ME 86, 96 A.3d 80, and State v. Mitchell , 2010 ME 73, 4 A.3d 478, we affirmed the exclusion of alternative-suspect evidence as insufficiently connec......
-
State v. Gagne
...the caller at trial, even if that opportunity came after the initial direct testimony and cross-examination of the victim. State v. Cruthirds , 2014 ME 86, ¶¶ 15–20, 96 A.3d 80.[¶ 35] Here, the victim testified at trial and explained her loss of memory of the details of events.6 She underwe......
-
State v. Cote
...lost, the defendant is not required to make a showing of bad faith.3 See Trombetta, 467 U.S. at 489, 104 S.Ct. 2528 ; see, e.g., State v. Cruthirds, 2014 ME 86, ¶ 29, 96 A.3d 80 (stating that there are three elements the defendant must prove); State v. Kremen, 2000 ME 117, ¶ 15, 754 A.2d 96......