State v. Hughes
| Decision Date | 19 June 1986 |
| Docket Number | No. 49493-2,49493-2 |
| Citation | 721 P.2d 902,106 Wn.2d 176 |
| Parties | STATE of Washington, Respondent, v. Robert Wayne HUGHES, Appellant. |
| Court | Washington Supreme Court |
Washington Appellate Defender, Paris K. Kallas, Nancy L. Talner, Raymond H. Thoenig, Robert Wayne Hughes, c/o Washington Appellate Defender, Seattle, for appellant.
Norm Maleng, King Co. Prosecutor, Deborah Phillips, Deputy, Seattle, for respondent.
The defendant, Robert Wayne Hughes, appeals his conviction of aggravated murder in the first degree and the sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole which followed.
On June 17, 1982, one John Early was shot and killed in his home during an apparent robbery. A King County police officer, Sergeant Samuel Hicks, soon suspected that the defendant was involved in the murder. He requested assistance in the Early investigation, and King County Detective Leo Hursh tracked down the address of the defendant's girl friend. The two of them then drove to her home in rural south King County on the morning of June 24. They wore street clothes and drove an unmarked Camaro automobile.
The two officers drove by the residence where they saw the defendant getting into a pickup truck. The officers then drove to a nearby residence and phoned for additional support. When they emerged, they saw the pickup truck driving off. They followed the pickup for about two miles and noticed that its three passengers were looking back at them. (The defendant's companions were later identified as his brother and his girl friend's son.) The officers followed the pickup until it pulled into the driveway of a dairy farm adjacent to the Flaming Geyser State Park. The officers got out of the Camaro with their guns drawn, announced they were police and ordered the truck ignition turned off. The defendant denied hearing that announcement. A 7-minute gun battle ensued, during which the defendant shot and killed the police sergeant and wounded the detective.
On June 29, 1982, the King County Prosecuting Attorney charged the defendant with aggravated murder in the first degree and assault in the first degree. The prosecutor filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty on the same day. On July 7, the information was amended to also charge the defendant with the first degree felony murder of John Early.
The two murder cases were set to be tried together. When the trial court denied a motion to sever, the defendant pled guilty to the Early murder. The defendant later testified that he shot the officers in self-defense, thinking that the two had a contract on his life because of a drug deal. He denied knowing they were police officers.
The jury found the defendant guilty of aggravated murder in the first degree and assault in the first degree, but was unable to agree on whether mitigating circumstances merited leniency. Accordingly, the trial court sentenced the defendant to life without possibility of parole for the police sergeant's murder. Separate life sentences were imposed based on the assault of the detective and the prior murder of John Early.
The defendant appealed his conviction, and we accepted direct review.
Eight basic issues are presented.
ISSUE ONE. Is the procedure of "death qualifying" a jury in a capital case unconstitutional?
ISSUE TWO. Did the trial court err in refusing to give the defendant's proposed instruction on "imperfect" self-defense?
ISSUE THREE. Did the trial court err in giving an "aggressor/provoker" jury instruction?
ISSUE FOUR. Was the defendant denied a fair trial because of prosecutorial misconduct?
ISSUE FIVE. Is the defendant's conviction unconstitutional because the jury was not instructed to find that the defendant knew the victim was performing his official duties at the time of the murder?
ISSUE SIX. Did the state fail to present sufficient evidence on the issue of whether the defendant committed premeditated murder?
ISSUE SEVEN. Did the trial court err in admitting statements made by the defendant after he was jailed?
ISSUE EIGHT. Did the mandatory statutory sentence of life imprisonment without parole, entered on the charge of murdering the police sergeant, amount to an unconstitutional restriction of the judiciary's sentencing power?
ISSUE ONE.
CONCLUSION. The quest in this case, as elsewhere, is for jurors who will conscientiously apply the law and find the facts. In a capital case, the death qualification process during voir dire examination ensures that the law is upheld and interferes with neither party's right to a fair trial; it is not unconstitutional.
By pretrial motion, the defendant sought to preclude the court from death qualifying the jury. In this connection, we observe parenthetically that "death qualification" is the process whereby prospective jurors are asked about the death penalty and excluded from the final panel if they oppose it. 1 In support of his motion, the defendant submitted several studies regarding the effects of death qualification on prospective jurors. After considering these materials, the trial court denied the defendant's motion to preclude voir dire questioning on capital punishment and to prevent the removal for cause of "anti-death penalty" jurors.
Thus, both attorneys were permitted to question prospective jurors concerning their views on capital punishment. The trial judge also asked questions concerning this. The prospective jurors were questioned individually and were cautioned by the court to not discuss their voir dire examination with anyone else. Four prospective jurors were challenged for cause and discharged because of their death penalty views. One, a Christian pastor, was excused because of his total opposition toward the death penalty. Another was excused because she apparently too strongly favored imposing the death penalty. Two others were excused because they strongly opposed capital punishment and either stated or implied that their opposition might affect their ability to determine guilt or innocence.
The United States Supreme Court has consistently upheld the procedure of death qualifying a jury in a capital case. 2 Thus, a prospective juror may appropriately be questioned about the death penalty and may then be challenged for cause if the juror's views on capital punishment would "prevent or substantially impair the performance of his duties as a juror in accordance with his instructions and his oath." 3
Both the premise of death qualification and the actual exclusion of jurors because of their views on capital punishment have similarly been upheld by this court. 4 Washington courts will exclude not only those jurors who will never vote for the death penalty at the one extreme, but also those who will automatically impose it at the other. 5
Until recently, neither this court nor the United States Supreme Court had definitively answered the question presented here: whether the process of death qualifying prospective jurors in a capital case makes the final panel prosecution prone. The question was raised in Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510, 88 S.Ct. 1770, 20 L.Ed.2d 776, reh'g denied, 393 U.S. 898, 89 S.Ct. 67, 21 L.Ed.2d 186 (1968), but was left unanswered because the Court decided that the literature on the subject was "too tentative and fragmentary to establish that jurors not opposed to the death penalty tend to favor the prosecution in the determination of guilt." 6
The California Supreme Court undertook one of the first comprehensive surveys of death qualification literature in Hovey v. Superior Court, 28 Cal.3d 1, 616 P.2d 1301, 168 Cal.Rptr. 128 (1980). It concluded that California death qualified jurors were not so prosecution prone as to violate the constitutional demands of jury neutrality. This was because California excluded not only "anti-death penalty" jurors but "automatic death penalty" jurors as well. 7 The exclusion of "automatic" jurors had not been considered in the studies surveyed in Hovey. 8
The defendant herein sought to rehabilitate the Hovey materials with new studies indicating that the automatic death penalty group is so small as to be statistically insignificant. The defendant also sought to establish that questioning jurors about the death penalty desensitizes them and makes them more prone to convict. On appeal, the defendant relied chiefly on the Eighth Circuit's decision in Grigsby v. Mabry, 758 F.2d 226 (8th Cir.1985), rev'd sub nom. Lockhart v. McCree, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986). The Grigsby majority reviewed much of the available literature and concluded that death qualified juries are conviction prone. 9 The United States Supreme Court reviewed similar studies and doubted that they proved that death qualified juries are prosecution prone. 10 Even assuming that the literature so proved, however, the Court upheld as constitutional the process whereby death-opposed jurors are excluded from a jury in a capital case. 11
The Supreme Court first analyzed the major issue in Grigsby and one of the arguments the defendant raises here: whether an impartial jury can exist when a distinct group in the community is excluded by systematically challenging them for cause. 12
The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee a defendant a jury that is representative of the community. 13 "[V]enires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups in the community and thereby fail to be reasonably representative thereof." 14 The Grigsby majority found that anti-death penalty jurors constitute a distinct group whose exclusion violates a defendant's Sixth Amendment rights. 15
The United States Supreme Court disagreed, holding that groups defined solely in terms of shared attitudes that would prevent or substantially impair members of the group from performing one of their duties as jurors, are notdistinctive groups for Sixth Amendment purposes. 16 The...
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