State v. Daly
| Decision Date | 08 July 2021 |
| Docket Number | Docket: Pen-20-215 |
| Citation | 254 A.3d 426,2021 ME 37 |
| Parties | STATE of Maine v. F DALY |
| Court | Maine Supreme Court |
Rory A. McNamara, Esq. (orally), Drake Law, LLC, York, for appellant F Daly
Aaron M. Frey, Attorney General, and Donald W. Macomber, Asst. Atty. Gen. (orally), Office of the Attorney General, Augusta, for appellee State of Maine
Panel: MEAD, GORMAN, JABAR, HUMPHREY, HORTON, and CONNORS, JJ.
[¶1] F Daly appeals from a judgment of conviction of knowing or intentional murder, 17-A M.R.S. § 201(1)(A) (2021), entered by the court (Penobscot County, A. Murray , J. ) after a five-day jury trial, and from the court's imposition of a forty-two-year sentence and denial of his motion for a new trial. Daly argues that the court erred or abused its discretion in excluding alternative-suspect evidence, failing to provide an adequate explanation in setting the basic sentence, and denying his motion for a new trial, which was based on a juror's statements made after the conviction.1 We affirm the judgment, the sentence, and the denial of the motion for a new trial.
[¶2] Based on the evidence presented at trial, the jury rationally could have found beyond a reasonable doubt, see State v. Haag , 2012 ME 94, ¶ 17, 48 A.3d 207, that on January 7, 2018, Daly went to the victim's residence and shot the victim in the abdomen and the head, causing his death. After the police learned of Daly's confession to his girlfriend and discovered Daly's gun hidden in the ceiling of his apartment, Daly was charged by criminal complaint with the victim's murder. Daly was indicted for murder on February 28, 2018.2 He entered a plea of not guilty.3
[¶3] In September 2019, two weeks before the start of the jury trial, the State moved to exclude evidence of alternative suspects, asking that the court hear outside the presence of the jury any proposed testimony regarding an alternative suspect before admitting it in evidence. The court did not rule on the motion in advance of trial. Instead, it ruled on objections to evidence of alternative suspects during the trial. Specifically, the court sustained the State's objections to questions asking the victim's girlfriend about an incident in the summer of 2017 involving the victim and another person. Daly argued that he was offering evidence that the other person had stabbed the victim during the 2017 incident in order to challenge the credibility of the testimony of the victim's girlfriend that she had never seen the victim get into fights. He argued that the person who purportedly stabbed the victim was an alternative suspect who had a motive to kill the victim and was in the area at the time of the victim's death. The court ruled that the evidence was not admissible as alternative-suspect evidence and that it did not undermine the credibility of the victim's girlfriend unless there was evidence that she saw the fight that resulted in the stabbing.
[¶4] Before the victim's girlfriend was dismissed as a witness, Daly renewed his objection to the exclusion of evidence of the earlier knife wound the victim had suffered. He represented that the person who had purportedly stabbed the victim had been prosecuted for the stabbing, was to begin serving time for the resulting conviction near the time of the murder, and was in Bangor the weekend of the victim's death with individuals identified as "Truck" and "Capitol" and therefore had the opportunity to murder the victim. The court excluded the evidence, concluding that even if Daly established those facts, there was no reasonable connection between the person who purportedly stabbed the victim and the crime at issue.
[¶5] On the second day of trial, the State indicated that it had learned that, contrary to Daly's earlier representations, the person who purportedly stabbed the victim in 2017 had not been arrested or charged for that conduct and had had an upcoming court appearance only for an unrelated theft charge. The court reaffirmed its ruling that no alternative-suspect evidence regarding that person would be admitted because it "did not meet the threshold for relevance necessary."
[¶6] The court also excluded a small portion of an otherwise admitted deposition of Daly's roommate regarding the sale of drugs by the individuals known as Capitol and Truck because there was no reasonable connection between either of them and the crime. Daly did not offer any additional foundation for the involvement of either of them in the murder. Daly's girlfriend did, however, later testify that Daly told her that he had visited Truck, shown him the gun, and asked him to call Capitol just before Daly went to the victim's apartment and killed the victim.
[¶7] The State presented evidence of the following to establish its case against Daly:
[¶8] After the State presented its case, Daly moved for a judgment of acquittal, and the court denied his motion. Daly called one witness and then rested. The jury found Daly guilty.
[¶9] After obtaining a presentence investigation report and a psychological evaluation of Daly, the court held a sentencing hearing on July 16, 2020. The court first determined the basic sentence based on the nature and seriousness of the crime as committed. See State v. Carrillo , 2021 ME 18, ¶ 38, 248 A.3d 193. The court found that the nature and seriousness of the crime did not justify a life sentence. The court determined that a basic sentence of forty to fifty years was appropriate because Daly made hurried calls to determine where the victim lived and then quickly went to the victim's home, with some planning, and shot him for reasons unknown, but the facts were not as heinous as in other cases, such as when a person was stabbed fifty times in the face, a child was sexually abused and killed, a child was burned to death in a hot oven, and people were burned to death in the back of a locked box truck.4
[¶10] The court then considered aggravating and mitigating factors to determine the final sentence. See id. As aggravating factors, the court found that the victim's family was suffering, that Daly lacked remorse when speaking of the crime to his girlfriend, and that Daly was "rigid, highly controlled, and quite adept at providing a very limited scope of information about himself," which did "not bode well for the rehabilitative purpose of sentencing." The court found mitigating factors that included the lack of any significant criminal history for Daly and his untreated trauma issues. The court determined that the weight of the aggravating factors was "substantially similar" to the weight of the mitigating factors. The court sentenced Daly to serve forty-two years in prison and pay $4,650 in restitution.
[¶11] Daly timely appealed from the judgment of conviction. See 15 M.R.S. § 2115 (2021) ; M.R. App. P. 2B(b)(1). He also applied for review of his sentence. See 15 M.R.S. § 2151 (2021). The Sentence Review Panel granted Daly leave to appeal his sentence.
[¶12] While this appeal and the sentence review were pending, in November 2020, Daly moved for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence that one of the jurors had contacted defense counsel to say that three of the jurors had hesitated to find Daly guilty because they were not initially convinced that Daly had not gone to the apartment of Truck and Capitol to give one or both of them his gun before the victim was shot.5 See M.R.U. Crim. P. 33. The juror informed counsel that the three jurors had ultimately voted to convict because if Truck or Capitol had caused the victim's death using Daly's gun, "why didn't [Daly]’s attorneys say so?"
[¶13] Daly argued that this information justified a new trial when considered in light of evidence that Daly told his girlfriend that he had gone to Truck's apartment first and had shown him the gun, asking him to call Capitol before he left for the victim's apartment. He argued that the juror's statements demonstrated that the exclusion of alternative-suspect evidence affected the fairness of his...
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