State v. Enright
| Decision Date | 23 December 1998 |
| Docket Number | No. 97-671,97-671 |
| Citation | 292 Mont. 204,55 St.Rep. 1308,974 P.2d 1118 |
| Parties | , 1998 MT 322 STATE of Montana, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Donna June ENRIGHT, Defendant and Appellant. |
| Court | Montana Supreme Court |
Jon A. Oldenburg, Attorney at Law; Lewistown, for Appellant.
Hon. Joseph P. Mazurek, Attorney General; Joseph E. Thaggard and Elizabeth Horsman, Assistant Attorneys General; Helena, for Respondent.
¶1 The defendant, Donna June Enright, was charged by information in the District Court for the Tenth Judicial District in Judith Basin County with felony arson and deliberate homicide. The State filed a notice of intent to introduce evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts, and Enright filed a motion in limine to exclude the evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts. The District Court granted in part and denied in part the motion in limine. After a five-day jury trial, Enright was convicted of felony arson and deliberate homicide. Enright appeals from her conviction. We vacate the judgment of the District Court and remand this case to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
¶2 Enright presents two issues on appeal:
¶3 1. Did the District Court abuse its discretion when it denied in part Enright's motion in limine and admitted evidence of the 1995 fire during her trial?
¶4 2. Was there sufficient evidence to support the jury's verdict?
¶5 Faye Theis and Leonard Theis were married in 1961. The couple had no children together, but Faye had children from a previous marriage, including Margaret Distad, Donna June Enright, and Roy Link.
¶6 In 1988, Faye and Leonard purchased and moved into a trailer in Great Falls. Faye and Leonard eventually began to suffer from the effects of dementia and Alzheimer's disease and, in approximately November 1993, Distad and Link acquired a power of attorney on Faye's behalf, as did Enright and Link on Leonard's behalf. Faye and Leonard entered a Great Falls nursing home in November 1993. Shortly thereafter, however, Leonard left the nursing home and returned to the trailer. Enright then became his guardian. Faye remained in the nursing home.
¶7 In February 1995, Link exercised his power of attorney to transfer Faye's interest in the trailer to John Kozlowitz. Enright also transferred Leonard's interest to Kozlowitz. A week after Kozlowitz became the owner of the trailer, the home burned and he was paid the insurance proceeds. The Great Falls Fire Department conducted an investigation of the fire, but did not determine the cause of the fire and found no evidence of foul play. The adjuster for the insurer of the trailer saw nothing unusual about the circumstances of the fire and, after interviewing the fire department's investigator, saw no need to conduct an independent investigation of the cause.
¶8 A few months later, Enright, Kozlowitz, Leonard, and Tom Martin, Enright's son, formed the Sundown Inn, Inc. corporation for the purpose of purchasing and operating a bar and restaurant in Stanford. Enright, Leonard, and Kozlowitz all then moved from Great Falls to Stanford, where they purchased three trailer lots. Kozlowitz owned the two trailers that they kept on the lots, and he lived in one, while Enright and Leonard lived in the other trailer. Financial difficulties eventually led the group to abandon their operation of the Sundown Inn in April 1996. It appears that Enright and Leonard continued to live in Stanford, although they spent considerable time at Enright's home in Great Falls.
¶9 In July 1996, Enright applied for and eventually received on behalf of Leonard a lump sum distribution of Leonard's remaining pension benefits worth approximately $38,000. Between July and October, six different insurance policies were purchased to insure Leonard's life; Enright and Kozlowitz paid some of the premiums. Testimony at trial suggested that Enright had actually prepared the applications and forged Leonard's signature. The policies named Martin, Enright, and Link as beneficiaries. In September 1996, Enright and Leonard moved back to Great Falls, after which Enright and Link made frequent trips to Stanford where they removed furniture from the Stanford trailer and transferred it to their residence in Great Falls.
¶10 On October 16, 1996, Enright and Leonard drove to Stanford from Great Falls in order to do their laundry at the Stanford trailer; they had no laundry facilities in Great Falls. After they had lunch at a cafe and went to a bar, Enright and Leonard were met by Link and his wife, who had come to Stanford to pick up one of Leonard's chairs from the trailer. Link and his wife were at the bar only a short while before they went to get the chair, but Enright and Leonard remained at the bar until approximately 8:30 p.m. Over the course of the evening, Enright accrued approximately $1200 in gambling losses.
¶11 Enright and Leonard returned to the trailer. Enright did the laundry and Leonard watched television. Leonard was developing a cold, so in addition to turning up the furnace in the trailer and covering a number of the vents to channel the heat toward Leonard's part of the trailer, Enright gave Leonard some cold medicine. Earlier in the day, Link had also allegedly given Leonard Tylenol with codeine. According to Enright, Leonard went to bed in his room of the trailer at approximately 11:30 p.m. and she did not fall asleep until approximately 2:30 a.m.
¶12 Enright contends that she awoke shortly after she fell asleep to the sound of a smoke alarm. She opened her bedroom door, but was confronted with smoke from the hallway and shut the door. She then jumped out of her bedroom window to escape the trailer. Enright tried to enter the trailer through its back door, but was unable to do so when confronted by flames. She ran next door to Kozlowitz's trailer and called 911 at 3:40 a.m. She and Kozlowitz then tried to enter the burning trailer through the front door, but retreated because it was too dark.
¶13 When officials arrived to fight the fire, Enright told them that Leonard was still inside the trailer in his bedroom; however, fire officials eventually found Leonard's body partially covered by a blanket on the living room couch, where he had apparently been asleep. An autopsy revealed that Leonard died of carbon monoxide poisoning from smoke inhalation. It further revealed the presence of therapeutic doses of potentially sedative drugs, such as Benadryl and codeine.
¶14 A few days later, agent Joe Uribe from the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Montana Department of Justice was contacted by the Judith Basin County Sheriff to investigate Leonard's death. During a search of the trailer, Uribe and other officers seized an empty bottle of sedative drugs, and a battery-operated smoke alarm that they found in the hallway; they could not, however, find a battery for the alarm. Uribe interviewed Enright on November 6, 1996. He testified that she told him, among other things, that she was unaware of any life insurance policies for Leonard. Uribe also testified that during the interview Enright made a number of other statements that appeared inconsistent with her earlier statements regarding the fire. The next day he searched her home in Great Falls, where he found the six life insurance policies, a number of bills issued to Enright, Kozlowitz, Link, Martin, and Leonard, and several items of property which Enright had told her insurer had been destroyed in the fire.
¶15 Six experts investigated the fire and testified at trial. They consistently testified that the fire started in a third bedroom that served as a storage room. Several witnesses testified that the cause of the fire was a collection of newspapers that was stored in a corner of the room. They all agreed that no accelerants were used to start the fire, and that there was no evidence of any deliberate act to start the fire. Based largely on their inability to attribute the fire to any accidental cause, several experts opined that the cause of the fire was incendiary, as opposed to natural or undetermined.
¶16 On November 13, 1996, Enright was charged by information in the District Court for the Tenth Judicial District in Judith Basin County with felony arson and deliberate homicide; the information was later amended to include an alternate charge of deliberate homicide pursuant to the felony murder rule at § 45-5-102(1)(b), MCA. Link and Kozlowitz were also charged a few months later based on their alleged roles in the fire and Leonard's death.
¶17 On April 14, 1997, the State filed its notice of intent to introduce evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts by Enright. In order to prove motive, common scheme, and a nonaccidental cause of this fire, the State sought to introduce evidence that on seven previous occasions Enright had been involved in home or automobile fires for the purpose of making fraudulent insurance claims. Enright filed a motion in limine to exclude, among other things, all evidence of previous fires and insurance claims. After a hearing, the District Court granted in part and denied in part Enright's motion. It held that all of the previous fires and the respective insurance claims were too remote in time and/or too dissimilar factually to be admitted, with the exception of the 1995 Great Falls trailer fire. The court held that evidence of the 1995 fire could be admitted.
¶18 A five-day jury trial was conducted from June 16-20, 1997. During the trial, the District Court permitted the State's witnesses to testify regarding the 1995 fire and the insurance claims made as a result of it. The jury convicted Enright of arson and deliberate homicide, and she was ordered by the District Court to serve a seventy-five-year sentence.
¶19 Did the District Court abuse its discretion when it denied in part Enright's motion in limine...
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