State v. Griffin
| Decision Date | 27 July 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 20090520,20090520 |
| Citation | 2016 UT 33,384 P.3d 186 |
| Parties | State of Utah, Appellee, v. Glenn Howard Griffin, Appellant. |
| Court | Utah Supreme Court |
Sean D. Reyes, Att'y Gen., John J. Nielsen, Asst. Att'y Gen., Salt Lake City, for appellee,
Jennifer Gowans Vandenberg, Park City, for appellant
On Direct Appeal
INTRODUCTION
¶ 1 This thirty-two-year-old murder case is back before us on appeal for the second time. In 2005, Glenn Howard Griffin was charged with the 1984 murder of Bradley Perry, who was working at a Texaco gas station in Perry, Utah. The State sought the death penalty. The jury convicted Mr. Griffin of murder but imposed a sentence of life without parole instead of death. When the case was first before us on appeal, we remanded it to the trial court for a rule 23B hearing addressing three issues regarding Mr. Griffin's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel.1 We stayed the rest of Mr. Griffin's appeal pending the outcome of those proceedings. We now address the trial court's findings from the rule 23B hearing and several of Mr. Griffin's original claims, based on which Mr. Griffin seeks to set aside his conviction. We affirm Mr. Griffin's conviction.
¶ 2 Early in the morning of May 26, 1984, Utah State University students Ali Sabbah and Bassem Barish stopped at a Texaco gas station in Perry, Utah, having left Logan around midnight to drive to Ogden.2 They were about to put gas in their car when a man came out of the gas station and offered to help them pump the gas, even though the pump was a self-service gas pump. The man was around six feet tall and lean with black eyes and dark hair, as well as a black or dark beard, and was wearing sneakers. As the man was pumping their gas, Mr. Sabbah saw cuts and bruises on the man's hand, and both students noticed that his arms were covered with scratches. Mr. Sabbah also noticed what appeared to be “kind of dried up blood” smeared on the man's shirt or jeans and shiny, fresh blood on the man's sneakers. After the man finished pumping the gas, Mr. Sabbah paid him for the gas with five one-dollar bills.
¶ 3 Mr. Barish then decided that he wanted to buy cigarettes and started to make his way toward the building. The man intercepted him and asked what Mr. Barish was doing. When Mr. Barish answered that he was going to get cigarettes, the man offered to retrieve them from the gas station for him. Mr. Barish asked how much the cigarettes cost, and the man responded that they cost one dollar. The man retrieved the cigarettes and gave them to Mr. Barish, who gave the man a five-dollar bill. The man gave him four one-dollar bills as change, which Mr. Sabbah believed were from the five dollars that he had given the man for the gas. When the man handed Mr. Barish the cigarettes and his change, Mr. Barish noticed that there appeared to be fresh blood on one of the dollar bills. After this exchange, the students got back in their car and drove away.
¶ 4 This encounter raised the suspicions of both Mr. Sabbah and Mr. Barish. Mr. Barish showed the dollar bill with blood on it to Mr. Sabbah, who also thought it looked like fresh blood. He then placed the bloody dollar bill on the dashboard of the car. The students subsequently sped down the road in an attempt to get pulled over and make contact with the police. After their attempt to get pulled over failed, the students stopped at a pay phone, and Mr. Sabbah called 911. The 911 operator told the students not to leave their location and to wait for an officer to arrive. Approximately ten to thirty minutes later, an officer, who Mr. Sabbah recalled identified himself as Alan, arrived at the students' location. Either Alan or another officer took the four one-dollar bills, including the one with blood on it, from the students and placed them in plastic bags. The students followed the officers to the police station, where the officers took their statements. The students were also interviewed at the police station. During the interview, Mr. Sabbah drew two sketches of the man who pumped the gas, one depicting the man's profile and the other his face.
¶ 5 Police officers arrived at the gas station around 4:30 a.m. When the responding officers entered the building, they saw a blood trail on the floor leading to a storage room. The storage room door was locked, so one of the officers, Officer Joseph Lynn Yeates, climbed up on a structure outside the building to peer into the storage room through a window. Through the window, Officer Yeates saw a man lying on the ground with multiple injuries. After calling for an ambulance, Officer Yeates reentered the store and together with another officer kicked in the storage room door. He then checked the victim's body and determined that the victim was dead. At that point, Officer Yeates canceled the ambulance and called for detectives to respond to the scene. The police vacuumed the “fight area of the crime scene” to collect evidence. During the investigation at the gas station, Officer Dennis Able also recorded and narrated a video of the crime scene.
¶ 6 The victim was identified as Bradley Perry, who worked as a clerk at the gas station. The condition of his body testified to the violent nature of the crime. His hands were tied behind his back with an electrical cord, and he was covered with injuries, including bruises on his shoulders, torso, head, and face. Mr. Perry had what police believed to be a defensive wound on his hand from warding off an attack with a knife, as well as stab wounds on the front of his torso and on his back. Police believed that some of the wounds on Mr. Perry's chest and back were caused by a screwdriver. Mr. Perry also had a head wound that police believed had been inflicted by striking him in the head with a sixty-pound Dr. Pepper syrup container found near his body. Mr. Perry had a fractured jaw and skull. The medical examiner also found injuries consistent with strangulation. Ultimately, the medical examiner determined that Mr. Perry's death was caused by the combination of blunt force injuries to the head and neck and multiple stab wounds.
¶ 7 The state of the storage room and other areas of the gas station showed that there had been a violent struggle. In the arcade area, there were scuff marks on the floor, a large potted plant that had been moved and broken, and there was a smear of blood in the middle of the floor. And in the storage room, there were “spatters and splashes and transfers of blood,” “items that had been stepped on and wadded up,” and a dental bridge or partial dental bridge that was lying “some distance from the body.” Police also found bloody shoeprints from two different kinds of shoes, neither of which matched Mr. Perry's shoes, all around the body and throughout the gas station. About one hundred dollars were missing from the cash register.
¶ 8 Over the years following Mr. Perry's murder, the police had approximately two hundred suspects. State v. Griffin , 2015 UT 18, ¶ 8, –––– P.3d ––––. The suspects included Thomas Nager, who was an employee at the gas station, and his friend Craig Martinez. One of the students, Mr. Sabbah, identified a picture of Mr. Nager as “consistent” with the man who pumped gas for him and Mr. Barish on the night of the murder. Mr. Nager testified at Mr. Griffin's trial, admitting to selling drugs out of the gas station and stealing money from the gas station. The manager of the gas station also testified that Mr. Nager was late for work on the day of the murder and that he was fired after discovery of the theft. Mr. Nager also testified that he was told by others that Mr. Martinez had “bragged” about committing the murder.
¶ 9 Another suspect who the police investigated was Michael Caldwell, who was recorded claiming that he drove Mr. Martinez and another man to the gas station, where they murdered Mr. Perry. Mr. Caldwell also asserted that he drove the two men to a river where they placed the murder weapon, a knife, “in a plastic bag with some rocks and threw the bag in the river.” But upon questioning by the police, Mr. Caldwell's story became inconsistent, and Mr. Caldwell denied having driven Mr. Martinez to the gas station and claimed that he was not serious about the recorded comments. Mr. Nager's, Mr. Martinez's, and Mr. Caldwell's DNA did not match the nuclear DNA blood evidence or the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hair evidence collected from the crime scene. The case went cold.
¶ 10 In June 2005, Mr. Griffin was implicated in the murder when the Utah State Crime Lab checked the nuclear DNA from the blood on the dollar bill against the Utah Combined DNA Index System and discovered that it matched Mr. Griffin's DNA. Id. ¶ 9. The match was one in 1.7 trillion. Investigators then tested Mr. Griffin's mtDNA and found that Mr. Griffin could not be excluded as a source of the mtDNA from hairs found in the vacuumings from the crime scene back in 1984. Id. According to expert testimony, 99.94 percent of the population could be excluded as donors of the mtDNA, but Mr. Griffin could not be excluded. Additionally, photos showing Mr. Griffin with long hair and a beard bore a “striking similarit[y]” to the sketches Mr. Sabbah drew of the man on the night of the murder. Based on this evidence, the State charged Mr. Griffin with first-degree murder as a capital offense. Id. ¶ 10.
¶ 11 At Mr. Griffin's trial, one of the witnesses called by the State was Benjamin Britt, who had previously been incarcerated with Mr. Griffin. Mr. Britt testified that he had overheard several conversations between his cellmate and Mr. Griffin. Mr. Britt specifically testified that he overheard his cellmate and Mr. Griffin discussing “how the blood got onto the dollar bill that was given to a customer” and that Mr. Griffin...
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