State v. Garcia

• Citation: 743 A.2d 1038
• Decision Date: 26 January 2000
• Docket Number: No. 96-169-C.A.,96-169-C.A.
• Parties: STATE v. Jose GARCIA.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Rhode Island

743 A.2d 1038

STATE v. Jose GARCIA.

No. 96-169-C.A.

Supreme Court of Rhode Island.

January 26, 2000.

Before WEISBERGER, C.J., and LEDERBERG, BOURCIER, FLANDERS, and GOLDBERG, JJ.

Annie Goldberg, Aaron L. Weisman, Providence, for Plaintiff.

Janice Weisfeld, Paula Rosin, Providence, for defendant.

OPINION

FLANDERS, Justice.

A night of road rage and vengeful arson culminated in a family of six innocent victims, including four children, burning to death in a Providence house fire. Convicted of the grisly crimes leading to this holocaust, the defendant, Jose Garcia, challenges on appeal not only the propriety of certain evidence introduced against him at his trial, but also the sentences he received. For the reasons adduced below, we affirm the Superior Court's judgment of conviction.

I Facts and Travel

On the evening of February 26, 1993, defendant and several acquaintances were traveling by automobile in opposite directions on Haywood Street in Providence. The defendant was a passenger in a car driven by one of those acquaintances, Jose Tapia (Tapia); William Cifredo (William), Tapia's cousin, was driving another vehicle. The drivers had stopped their automobiles in the road and were conversing among themselves when another vehicle suddenly backed out of a driveway at 54 Haywood Street and collided with Tapia's car. An altercation quickly ensued between Tapia and the driver of thisother car, Samuel Lorenzo (Lorenzo). Meanwhile, an occupant in Lorenzo's automobile, Jorge Diep (Diep), left the car and briefly entered the house at 54 Haywood Street. Upon reemerging, Diep jumped into the driver's seat of Lorenzo's vehicle, shoved the gear into reverse, slammed his foot on the gas pedal, and bashed the vehicle into Tapia's car. By now William was out of his driver's seat and yelling at Diep to stop. But Diep was not yet done. He proceeded to run William over with Lorenzo's vehicle, trapping him underneath the car and dragging him several hundred feet down the road until William's body finally dropped free of the chassis. Eventually, an ambulance transported the battered William to Rhode Island Hospital where he underwent hours of emergency surgery. Ultimately, he survived.

While William's family and friends awaited an update on his condition at the hospital, defendant, who had witnessed the mayhem on Haywood Street, "came screaming on the ramp, [and] told everyone * * * they [were] going to get them for what they did to Will." He also stated that "he [had previously] burned [a] crackhead's house down because he owed him $600." After delivering this exhortation, defendant, with Tapia and others, proceeded by car back to the Haywood Street area. Tapia first drove to Vernon Street to drop off one of their friends. He and defendant then went inside a house and came out shortly thereafter. Tapia requested the keys to the trunk from the driver of their car, Latissa Southerland (Southerland), and retrieved a yellow antifreeze container from the vehicle's trunk. Tapia and defendant then climbed into the back seat of the car and requested Southerland to take them to a gas station. Once there, Tapia and defendant filled the antifreeze container with gasoline and reentered the car. Too anxious to drive any further, Southerland requested Tapia to take over the wheel. He did so and at about midnight they all drove to an apartment complex located two streets behind the house at 54 Haywood Street from which Diep had emerged to wreak havoc on William andhis car. Carrying the yellow container, defendant left the car with Tapia while the others remained there and waited for them. When defendant and Tapia returned some ten minutes later, defendant was no longer carrying the yellow container. As defendant and the others drove away from the scene, they could see smoke rising from the direction of Haywood Street. When one of the vehicle's occupants asked defendant what had happened, he responded that he and Tapia had "poured the gas from the top to the bottom."

As fate would have it, however, neither Lorenzo nor Diep, the intended targets of defendant's revenge, lived at 54 Haywood Street, nor were they otherwise present there when defendant and Tapia returned to the premises. But Carlos Chang, Hilda DeRosario, and their four children did live there. And they were all present in their apartment on the third floor when defendant and his accomplice doused the stairwells with gasoline and set the building ablaze. Despite a desperate attempt by Carlos Chang's brother-in-law, Ivan Ponce, to rescue them, the entire Chang family perished in the gasoline-induced inferno.

The next day, after hearing that the police were questioning some of the individuals who had been with him the previous evening, defendant boarded a van bound for New York. Nine days later, New York City police arrested him at his mother-in-law's Bronx apartment, at which point defendant unsuccessfully attempted to flee through a window. Ultimately, a jury convicted defendant of arson, conspiracy to commit arson, and the felony murder of the Chang family's six members. He was sentenced to two concurrent terms of life without parole, plus a term of ten years to serve, to be followed by four consecutive life sentences. Challenging the evidence that was introduced at his trial and the sentences he received, defendant appeals from these convictions.

II Analysis

A. Coerced Testimony

The defendant first claims that the police statements and trial testimony given by two of the witnesses against him were coerced and should have been suppressed. Because this evidence was introduced against him at trial, he contends that his federal constitutional right to due process of law was violated.¹ Because the totality of the circumstances pertaining to the gathering and the presentation of this evidence does not support his contention, we reject this argument.

At the outset, we note that persons who are mere witnesses to criminal acts do not enjoy the same federal due process protections when they are being questioned by the investigating authorities as do suspected wrongdoers who are being interrogated while they are in police custody. For example, Miranda warnings² need be given only to suspects in police custody, but not to potential witnesses who are subjected to investigative police questioning. See State v. Diaz, 654 A.2d 1195, 1204-05 (R.I. 1995). See also United States v. Mandujano, 425 U.S. 564, 579, 96 S.Ct. 1768, 1777-78, 48 L.Ed.2d 212, 220 (1976) (Miranda warnings are aimed at "the evils seen by the court as endemic to police interrogation of a person in custody"). Most importantly, even when a witness has been coerced into providing the police with a pretrial statement that implicates the accused, the mere fact that a witness has given the police such a statement during the investigation of a crime does not necessarily prevent the witness from testifying voluntarily at trial in a manner consistent with the pretrial statement. As we said in State v. Damiano, 587 A.2d 396, 399 (R.I.1991): "We know of no precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States that would require a jury to ignore the testimony of a live witnesson the basis of having a reasonable doubt concerning whether a prior statement containing the substance of such testimony had been produced by coercion." Nevertheless, this is exactly what defendant is suggesting should be the law when he argues in this appeal that the trial testimony of two witnesses should have been precluded on the basis of alleged pretrial coercion by the police in obtaining statements from them.

The defendant insinuates that one of the witnesses against him, Southerland, was a callow nineteen-year-old who had no previous experience in dealing with the police. He claims that the police arrested her two days after the fire without probable cause to do so and then held her at the police station for several hours, where, he says, they screamed at her, accused her of lying, threatened her with murder charges and with the loss of her child, and denied her request to call an attorney. He claims that these circumstances render involuntary any subsequent statements she gave to the police. Ultimately, he claims the trial justice should have suppressed not only these statements but also her trial testimony to avoid violating his due process right not to be convicted based upon coerced evidence.

The facts and the applicable law, however (see, e.g., Damiano, supra), support the contrary conclusion drawn by the trial justice. We will reverse a trial justice's findings on a motion to suppress only if (1) his or her findings concerning the challenged statements reveal clear error, and (2) our independent review of the conclusions drawn from the historical facts establishes that the defendant's federal constitutional rights were denied. See State v. Humphrey, 715 A.2d 1265, 1273 (R.I.1998). In this case, the police arrested Southerland on February 28, 1993, two days after the February 26 incidents that gave rise to the criminal charges against defendant. On that date, she gave the police a statement which she later described as "a half truth," but she did not incriminate defendant. The police then released her, only to bring her back to the station on the next day for additional questioning.Nevertheless, she refused to give them any further statements on that day. The police then released her again and told her to come back with an attorney. Thus, whatever the police may have said and done to Southerland on February 28, it did not cause her on that day (or the next) to implicate defendant in the crimes for which he was ultimately convicted.

The following day she did return to the police station with her lawyer, but still she gave no statement to the police at that time. Instead, the police and Southerland's attorney merely discussed the prospect of Southerland's giving the police another and more forthcoming statement about the fire....