State v. Jefferson

• Citation: 116 R.I. 124,353 A.2d 190
• Decision Date: 10 March 1976
• Docket Number: No. 75-24-C,75-24-C
• Parties: STATE v. Leonard C. JEFFERSON. A.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Rhode Island

Page 190

353 A.2d 190

116 R.I. 124

STATE v. Leonard C. JEFFERSON.

No. 75-24-C.A.

Supreme Court of Rhode Island.

March 10, 1976.

[116 R.I. 140] Julius C. Michaelson, Atty. Gen., William Granfield Brody, John Austin Murphy, Sp. Asst. Attys. Gen., for plaintiff.

William F. Reilly, Public Defender, Bruce G. Pollock, Asst. Public Defender, for defendant.

OPINION

KELLEHER, Justice.

At 7:46 p.m. on December 7, 1973, a unit of the Providence Fire Department's Rescue Squad responded to a call for assistance originating from an apartment house located at 24 Arch Street. When the squad members entered the premises, they found a bloody and unconscious elderly man lying in the hallway at the foot of a flight of stairs leading to the second floor. They transported him to St. Joseph's Hospital where he died. The deceased, Virginio DeFusco, owned the apartment house.

Subsequently, defendant, one of DeFusco's tenants, was arrested, indicted and tried before a Superior Court jury for the robbery and the murder of his 79-year-old landlord. The trial justice granted defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal on the robbery charge. The jury, however, found that Jefferson had killed DeFusco during the course of an attempted robbery which under G.L. 1956 (1969 Reenactment) § 11-23-1 constitutes first degree murder. The trial justice imposed the mandatory life sentence and defendant has appealed.

There are three facets to Jefferson's appeal. Two involve the trial justice's denial of defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal and the denial of a motion for a new trial. The remaining objection concerns certain remarks made by the prosecutor during his argument.

Before an assessment can be made of the correctness of the denial of the acquittal and new trial motions, it is necessary that we give a brief resume of some of the evidence adduced at trial.

Jefferson lived on the second floor of the Arch Street building, occupying apartment number 3. Jefferson's next door neighbors were David Jones and his common-law wife, Pearl. They resided in apartment number 2. Pearl's brother, Ernest L. Hawkins, and his girlfriend lived in apartment number 1. During the afternoon of December 7, Jefferson spent several hours in apartment 2 where he helped Jones consume several pints of whiskey. In between sips, Jefferson told Jones that he was 'going to rip the landlord off.' Sometime after imparting this information, Jefferson left Jones' apartment. Jones testified that he fell asleep shortly thereafter but was awakened by the sound of a scuffling or stomping going on in the hallway. Jones left his apartment and when he peered down the stairway, he saw Jefferson in the front hall kicking the landlord's inert body. Shocked, he quickly retreated to his apartment. Conscience or curiosity, however, apparently got the best of him because he returned to the hallway for a second look. This time, he saw Jefferson standing over the body looking through some papers. Jefferson beckoned Jones to come downstairs and he complied. Jefferson then gave him a $20 bill and told him to keep his mouth shut. Shortly thereafter, Jones and Jefferson left the premises and went to an Elmwood Avenue liquor store where they purchased some whiskey and other alcoholic beverages.

Pearl told the jury that when she came out into the hallway that evening to bring in her cat, she saw her landlord's badly beaten body lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood and Jefferson standing on the stairway just three steps away. Pearl called the rescue squad. Her brother, Ernest Hawkins, testified that about an hour earlier, 6 p.m. roughly, he had gone into the hallway and turned on the lights near a stairway that led to the third floor's communial bathroom. As soon as he flipped the switch, Jefferson appeared and extinguished the lights, telling Hawkins that he wanted everything quiet because he had 'something going.'

An Associate Medical Examiner told the jury that the autopsy revealed that the landlord's death was attributable to a brain hemorrhage which was caused by 'blunt trauma.' He stated that the head injuries were consistent with those caused by use of kicks or punches. Coincidentally Jefferson complained of a painfully swollen right hand shortly after his arrest. He was taken to the Rhode Island Hospital and x-rays disclosed a fracture. A picture of this grossly distorted appendage was placed in evidence. Jefferson told the police that he had sustained the injury at work.

A specialist assigned to the Providence Police Department's Bureau of Criminal Identification reported that a benzidine test conducted several hours after Jefferson's arrest indicated the presence of a 'medium amount' of blood on his hands.

Finally, the prosecution presented an expert witness who was an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose specialty was the microscopic examination of hairs, fibers and textile materials. The agent had made a comparison between certain scrapings taken from beneath four of Jefferson's fingernails and the fibers found in the woolen suit coat worn by the landlord at the time he was assaulted. The coat, introduced as an exhibit, has a subtle fabric pattern comprised of seven different colored fibers. The scrapings contained fragmented fibers identical to certain fibers found in the landlord's coat. The special agent opined that the fragments either came from the landlord's coat or some other material having the identical microscopic characteristics as the fibers found therein. He added that these fragments could not have been embedded under the fingernails by a mere causal touching; the contact which impacted this substance had to be 'substantial.'

The special agent also made a microscopic examination of a group of textile fibers that had been removed from a shirt which the Providence police had seized during a search of Jefferson's apartment. The agent testified that fibers lodged on this shirt and the sample fibers from the deceased's jacket were alike.

The defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal was presented at the conclusion of all the testimony. When such a motion is made, the trial justice's review of the evidence is restricted to an evaluation of that evidence which the state claims affords the requisite basis for submitting the case to the jury. The trial justice is bound to review this evidence, excluding the remainder, in a light most favorable to the state, drawing therefrom all reasonable inferences consistent with guilt. Neither the credibility of witnesses nor the weight of the evidence is before the court at that time. State v. Wilbur, R.I., 339 A.2d 730, 735 (1975); State v. Crescenzo, 114 R.I. 242, 256, 332 A.2d 421, 429-30 (1975).

Jefferson, in arguing that the trial justice erred by denying his acquittal motion, claims that the evidence pointing to his guilt is overwhelmingly circumstantial, supporting an inference of guilt, but failing to exclude the equally reasonable inference that he neither killed nor attempted to rob DeFusco. We cannot agree with this contention.

The so-called circumstantial evidence rule, relied on by Jefferson, requires a finding of not guilty only on the showing of a reasonable hypothesis of innocence, ¹ not a possible hypothesis of innocence. Even assuming that the rule is applicable in this case, it only measures the evidence which the state contends is capable of generating a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Looking at the evidence relied upon by the prosecutor, several critical facts emerge: (1) Jefferson's admission to his next door neighbor and drinking companion, Jones, that he was going to rip off the landlord, (2) the Hawkins lighting dilemma, when Jefferson turned off the power because he had 'something going,' (3) the neighbors' attention to the scuffling in the hallway, (4) the witnessing of Jefferson at the bottom of the stairway kicking the landlord and going through his papers, and (5) defendant's gift to Jones of a $20 bill accompanied by the instructions to keep quiet. Viewing the reasonable inferences from both these facts and the scientific findings by the municipal and federal authorities in a light most favorable to the prosecution, there was ample evidence to enable the jury to find that Jefferson had murdered his landlord while attempting to rob him. Although defendant has offered numerous potential explanations compatible with his innocence, none of them support an inference that reasonably flows from the evidence which the state claims and which, in fact, does support the denial of his motion for a judgment of acquittal.

In passing upon Jefferson's motion for a new trial, the trial justice reviewed and commented on the evidence which was relevant to the felony murder charge. He spoke of the rip off boast, the scuffling in the hallway, Jones' eyewitness account of defendant stomping and subsequent rummaging through the landlord's papers and Pearl placing Jefferson in the vicinity of the body. Moreover, the trial justice thought defendant's broken hand and the agent's testimony to be especially significant.

A defendant, who seeks to prevail on the contention that the trial justice erred in denying his motion for a new trial, must persuade us that he was either clearly wrong or that, in reviewing the evidence, he overlooked or misconceived material evidence on a controlling issue. State v. Howard, 114 R.I. 731, 738, 339 A.2d 259, 263 (1975); State v. Lima, 113 R.I. 6, 8, 316 A.2d 501, 502-03 (1974); State v. Wiggin, 106 R.I. 69, 73, 256 A.2d 219, 221 (1969). In seeking to discharge this burden, Jefferson contends that the trial justice misconceived the thrust of the special agent's testimony. This expert, who identified himself as a a'microscopist,' told the court and jury that he had used a comparison miscroscope to examine and compare several slides containing fragments of the woolen fibers found under Jefferson's fingernails with others...