State v. Fortin

• Decision Date: 03 February 2004
• Citation: 178 N.J. 540,843 A.2d 974
• Parties: STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Steven R. FORTIN, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: New Jersey Supreme Court

843 A.2d 974

178 N.J. 540

STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Steven R. FORTIN, Defendant-Appellant.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Argued October 22, 2002.

Decided February 3, 2004.

Order Granting Clarification February 6, 2004.

Jacqueline E. Turner and Linda Mehling, Assistant Deputy Public Defenders, argued the cause for appellant (Yvonne Smith Segars, Public Defender, attorney).

Nancy A. Hulett, Deputy Attorney General, argued the cause for respondent (Peter C. Harvey, Acting Attorney General of New Jersey, attorney). Justice ALBIN delivered the opinion of the Court.

Defendant Steven Fortin was convicted by a jury of capital murder and sentenced to death. He claims that he was denied a fair trial as a result of various rulings of the trial court in the guilt and penalty phases of the trial. We conclude that the trial errors were sufficiently egregious so as to deny defendant a fair trial and, therefore, we are constrained to reverse.

I. Facts and Procedural History

On August 11, 1994, twenty-five-year-old Melissa Padilla resided at the Gem Motel in Woodbridge with her four young children, ages two through five, and her boyfriend, Hector Fernandez.¹ Padilla and her children were receiving public assistance and had been placed at the motel by a social service agency. That day, at approximately 11:00 p.m., she left the motel to buy some food for her family and walked to a nearby Quick Chek convenience store located at the intersection of U.S. Highway Route 1 North and Avenel Street. Padilla's walk took her along a 1000-foot dirt path that ran parallel to Route 1 North. At 11:29 p.m., she purchased iced tea, pizza, bread, three sandwiches, a candy bar, and coffee with a $20 bill, receiving $0.66 in change. She left the Quick Chek and began on her way back to the motel.

When Padilla did not return, Fernandez became concerned and went to look for her, accompanied by the sons of the motel desk clerk, eleven-year-old Christopher and five-year-old Antoine, and a friend, Trent Eubanks, who was staying at the Gem Motel that evening. Five-year-old Antoine discovered Padilla's body 500 feet from the motel inside one of four concrete thirty-inch pipes, which lay on the path Padilla had taken to and from the store.

By the time the first police officer arrived on the scene at approximately 1:00 a.m., Fernandez had pulled Padilla's body out of the pipe. The officer found Fernandez and Eubanks standing near Padilla's badly battered body, which was naked from the waist down. Dr. Marvin Schuster, the county medical examiner, was called to the scene and pronounced Padilla dead at 1:06 a.m.

County investigators also arrived and canvassed the area for evidence. They observed Padilla's bloodied face, her blood-soaked shirt, and blood on her arms and hands. A pool of blood had collected in the concrete pipe and a bloody trail marked the distance Padilla's body had been dragged from the pipe. Blood spattering evidence indicated that the assault had taken place inside the construction pipe.

The police found no money or jewelry on or near Padilla's body. They did discover, however, a bloody dollar bill and receipt from the convenience store in the vicinity. Padilla's groceries were strewn about the area, including three sandwich containers, one of which was empty. The sandwich was later discovered, partially eaten, on a nearby street. The police found Padilla's shorts, with her underpants inside, in a tree a short distance from the sandwich. The investigation uncovered no identifiable fingerprints other than those of the victim.

An autopsy was conducted the next day. Dr. Schuster determined that Padilla had suffered numerous injuries, including a broken nose and bruises to her face and chest; lacerations to her chin and left breast that were possibly bite marks; and lacerations to the anus inflicted shortly before death that were consistent with forceful penetration by an object, possibly a finger or penis. Padilla suffered no observable injuries to her vagina. The evidence and absence of evidence—the presence of "few and scattered spermatozoa" in the vagina and no semen found on the body—suggested that Padilla was not vaginally assaulted. The bruises to Padilla's face and forehead were caused by a combination of blunt force trauma and the scraping of her skin against the concrete surface of the pipe. A fracture in Padilla's hyoid bone, hemorrhaging of her epiglottis (the upper portion of the windpipe), and abrasions to her neck revealed that she had been manually strangled. The medical examiner concluded that Padilla died from asphyxiation and that her anal injuries were the result of a sexual assault at or near the time of her death.

On August 11, 1994, the day of the murder, Steven Fortin lived with Dawn Archer, his former girlfriend, in the Douglas Motel located on Route 1, north of the Quick Chek, in Woodbridge. That evening, Archer and Fortin left their motel to visit a friend, Charles Bennett, who lived in the Five Oaks Apartments on the northbound side of Route 1, less than a mile south of the Douglas Motel. The Five Oaks Apartments were located to the south of the Gem Motel. Fortin and Archer walked south along the northbound side of Route 1 and stopped at the Quick Chek to buy some cigarettes.² After their arrival at Bennett's apartment around 9:00 p.m., the three drank alcohol. Archer remembered arguing with Fortin and Bennett asking them to leave. Bennett denied witnessing an argument between Fortin and Archer.

At approximately 10:30 p.m., Fortin and Archer left Bennett's apartment and continued to argue. After walking a short distance, Fortin turned violent and began to choke and kick Archer. He threw her to the ground, and Archer ran into a nearby restaurant, Bud's Hut, screaming for help.

At 10:32 p.m., a Woodbridge police officer responded to the Bud's Hut parking lot, where he found Archer intoxicated, red-faced and nose-bloodied. Archer told the police officer that her boyfriend, Steven Fortin, had attacked her. She, however, declined to sign a complaint against him. The police took Archer to the hospital, but she refused treatment.

At approximately 11:15 p.m., Fortin returned to Bennett's apartment looking for Archer. Bennett observed a few scratches on Fortin's leg but none on his face. Fortin explained that he had gotten the scratches while in a fight with Archer. He left Bennett's apartment a few minutes later. Fortin's walk back to the Douglas Motel would have set him in the direction of the brutal assault of Padilla. Archer's and Bennett's accounts placed Fortin near the Gem Motel and the Quick Chek around 11:30 p.m. on the evening of August 11, 1994.

On August 12, Fortin called a friend, Ron Celis, and met him at a diner. Fortin appeared upset and told Celis he was having "woman problems." Celis observed scratches on Fortin's face. Fortin explained that he got the scratches while traversing through a wooded area. Archer next saw Fortin on August 13, when the two reconciled. She noticed he had scratches, several inches long, on his face, chest, and arms.

Fortin and Archer moved out of the Douglas Motel and became itinerant travelers, mostly staying with friends. Eventually, they went to Maine to stay with Fortin's parents. During a trip to visit Archer's father in Massachusetts, Fortin struck Archer and the two parted for good. At the time of the investigation of the Padilla murder, the police had not gathered those facts and they had few leads to go on. There were no witnesses to the crime. Although the police took fingerprint exemplars from several local men who had been convicted of sexual assaults, there were no matches to fingerprints lifted from the scene. Fortin was not on their radar screen. Without leads or suspects, the investigation was stalled. In April 1995, the Maine State Police communicated with the Woodbridge police department about Fortin, who had been arrested for sexually assaulting Maine State Trooper Vicki Gardner. Fortin's savage assault on Trooper Gardner became the centerpiece of the State's case. The State would argue that the unique similarities between the sexual assaults against Gardner and Padilla led to only one conclusion—that the same man committed both crimes.

On the evening of April 3, 1995, Trooper Gardner was driving in a marked patrol car on Interstate Highway 95 in Maine, returning home from a visit to her parents. She was off-duty and not in uniform. Around 8:30 p.m., Gardner encountered Fortin in a car parked on the shoulder of Interstate 95, facing in the opposite direction of traffic. She stopped to investigate. Fortin explained to Trooper Gardner that he was lost. In response to a request for his credentials, Fortin could produce only a New Jersey driver's permit; he had no registration or insurance card. After detecting the smell of alcohol, Trooper Gardner asked Fortin to step from his car and to take a seat in the front passenger side of her patrol car. Walking slightly off-balance, Fortin entered the patrol car, where the trooper administered field sobriety tests. As a result of the tests, the trooper concluded that Fortin was legally intoxicated and decided to issue him several summonses, including one for driving under the influence.

Trooper Gardner radioed headquarters for back-up assistance from an on-duty officer. With Fortin seated beside her, and sensing no danger, the trooper completed the paperwork on the charges as she waited for a back-up officer. After forty-five minutes to an hour had passed without the arrival of assistance, Fortin told the trooper he had a proposition for her. Before he spoke any further, Trooper Gardner explained to him that she would listen, but that she was issuing him summonses and that he would have to post bail because he was an out-of-state resident. Fortin then proposed that she let him "get in the car and drive away and [she] could pretend that nothing had ever happened." The trooper...