State v. Lambert

• Citation: 341 N.C. 36,460 S.E.2d 123
• Decision Date: 28 July 1995
• Docket Number: No. 41A94,41A94
• Parties: STATE of North Carolina v. Tracie Ann Green LAMBERT.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of North Carolina

Page 123

460 S.E.2d 123

341 N.C. 36

STATE of North Carolina v. Tracie Ann Green LAMBERT.

No. 41A94.

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

July 28, 1995.

Michael F. Easley, Atty. Gen. by Jeffrey P. Gray, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.

Malcolm Ray Hunter, Jr., Appellate Defender by Daniel R. Pollitt, Asst. Appellate Defender, for defendant-appellant.

MITCHELL, Chief Justice.

Evidence for the State tended to show that on 25 November 1991 at 12:20 a.m., the Cabarrus County Sheriff's Department received an emergency phone call from defendant. The defendant, Tracie Ann Green Lambert, told the dispatcher that she was in bed asleep with her son in a back bedroom of her mobile home and had been awakened by a gunshot from the front of her home. She told the dispatcher that her husband was in the front part of the home. The dispatcher told her to stay in the back bedroom until police arrived and asked if anyone else was in the mobile home or if she had heard any other noises. She responded that her husband was alone as far as she knew and that the only other noise she had heard was the sound of the front door closing. Subsequently, the police arrived at the mobile home, and the dispatcher directed defendant to put the phone down and open the front door.

Deputy Lieutenant Tony McGuire arrived at the mobile home with three other deputies at approximately 12:30 a.m. He and Deputy Furr knocked on the front door while Deputies Clark and Mason went around to check the back door. Defendant opened the front door, and McGuire entered. McGuire asked defendant to turn on some lights and to show him where the noise originated. Defendant indicated that the noise had come from the front bedroom. Upon entering, McGuire saw the victim, Terry Lambert, lying on the left side of the bed, with his left arm outstretched. The victim had suffered a gunshot wound to the right rear side of his head. He was barely breathing and unresponsive when McGuire found him. The bedroom appeared to have been ransacked. Defendant asked about her husband's condition and McGuire informed her. Deputy Mason testified that defendant did not show a lot of emotion during this time. Deputy McGuire stated that she was "lackadaisical, distant [and] nervous," and appeared to be under the influence of an impairing substance. The victim died a few hours later.

Deputy Steve Cook arrived at the scene at approximately 12:55 a.m. Prior to Cook's arrival, defendant told the deputies that there were three guns in the house. Upon entering the house, Cook looked at a shelf on the entertainment center where one of the guns was located. He found the gun in a holster on the shelf and saw tracks in the dust which indicated that the gun had been moved recently. His examination also revealed that the gun was a loaded, cocked, .38-caliber pistol with its safety off. Cook also found a $100.00 bill lying on top of the entertainment center, a shirt and a pair of men's pants next to the entertainment center, and the victim's wallet containing over $100.00 in currency in the pants.

Approximately one-half hour after Deputy Cook's arrival, Deputy Beaver arrived to aid Cook and videotape the crime scene. At some point during the period when Cook and Beaver were processing the crime scene, defendant was taken by another deputy to the Sheriff's Department. While videotaping Deputy Beaver found a shell casing on the victim's bed and a bullet in the pillow where the victim's head had been resting. Subsequently, Beaver and Cook went to the back bedroom where defendant was allegedly sleeping when the gun went off and found what turned out to be a bag of cocaine under the mattress and more than two dozen beer cans under the bed. Further investigation indicated that the home had not been entered forcibly. Additionally, an examination of the back door and the .38-caliber pistol failed to reveal latent fingerprints.

Tests at the State Bureau of Investigation revealed that the bullet and the shell casing found by Deputy Beaver were fired from the .38-caliber pistol found on the dusty shelf of the entertainment center. The lab also reported that the gunshot residue test performed on defendant was negative. However, testimony by deputies revealed that after defendant was informed that she was being taken to the Sheriff's Department, she cried and wiped her face with her hands frequently. Deputy Beaver testified that the negative gunshot residue test could be explained by defendant's wringing of her hands and the use of her hands to wipe tears from her face.

On 27 November 1991, defendant was allowed to go to a local funeral home to view her husband. She was accompanied by a sheriff's deputy and a jail matron. Both testified that defendant was "pretty hysterical and crying." They also testified that while she stood over the victim's body, she stated twice: "Honey, why did you make me do it?"

Defendant also introduced evidence at trial. Josh, defendant's four-year-old son and the victim's stepson, initially told police that at the time of the killing, he got out of bed upon hearing a shot. He walked down the hall to the bedroom where his stepfather was located and saw another man standing in that bedroom. At trial, Josh admitted that did not happen. He also admitted that he did not know the sound was a gunshot until his maternal grandparents told him. The remainder of his trial testimony corroborated his mother's story.

Defendant testified that she loved the victim, that they had an excellent marriage, and that she did not kill him. She recounted that on the night of the murder, she had fallen asleep watching television in the back bedroom. Consistent with her emergency call to police, she testified that she was awakened by the sound of a gunshot and that she heard a door close a few seconds later. She immediately called the police and waited for their arrival. Eventually, she was taken to the Sheriff's Department for a gunshot residue test. She testified that after the deputies completed the test, they released her at about 4:30 a.m., and she went to her parents' home. At approximately 7:00 p.m. that same day, the police came to her parents' home and arrested her. She stated that she had never admitted killing her husband while she stood over his coffin at the funeral home and, that while there, she actually said that she did not kill him. Defendant also testified in detail about several incidents prior to the murder which she said had occurred at the mobile home. On two separate occasions, windows had been shot out of the mobile home or the victim's truck. On one of those occasions, a pistol was stolen out of defendant's truck but was later found on their property. Each of those incidents was reported to the police.

During the State's rebuttal evidence, it introduced testimony from two of the victim's friends. Each of them testified that a few days before the murder, the victim told them that he was leaving his wife because of her alcohol and cocaine abuse. The State also introduced testimony of a day care worker who testified that defendant had alcohol on her breath on several occasions when she dropped her son off for day care in 1991.

By an assignment of error, defendant argues that the trial court erred in denying her motion to dismiss for insufficiency of the State's evidence to sustain her conviction for murder. To convict a defendant of murder, the State "must offer evidence from which it can be reasonably inferred that the deceased died by virtue of a criminal act and that the act was committed by the defendant." State v. Furr, 292 N.C. 711, 718, 235 S.E.2d 193, 198, cert. denied, 434 U.S. 924, 98 S.Ct. 402, 54 L.Ed.2d 281 (1977). It is undisputed that the victim in this case died by virtue of a criminal act. The issue defendant presents by this assignment of error is whether there was substantial evidence tending to show that the criminal act was committed by defendant.

The law will not allow a conviction on evidence that merely gives rise to suspicion or conjecture that the defendant committed the crime. State v. Jones, 280 N.C. 60, 184 S.E.2d 862 (1971); see also State v. Furr, 292 N.C. 711, 235 S.E.2d 193. However, a motion to dismiss must be denied if there is substantial evidence--direct, circumstantial, or both--that the defendant committed the crime. State v. Thomas, 296 N.C. 236, 244, 250 S.E.2d 204, 208-09 (1978). " 'Substantial evidence' is that amount of relevant evidence that a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion." State v. Cox, 303 N.C. 75, 87, 277 S.E.2d 376, 384 (1981). When considering a motion to dismiss, the evidence presented must be considered in the light most favorable to the State, and the State is entitled to every reasonable inference to be drawn therefrom. State v. Easterling, 300 N.C. 594, 604, 268 S.E.2d 800, 806-07 (1980). We conclude that when considering the evidence in the light most favorable to the State in the present case, there was substantial evidence from which the jury could conclude that defendant was the one who shot and killed her husband.

Defendant cites Jones and Furr as controlling on this issue. We find those cases easily distinguishable from the present case. In both of those cases, evidence of opportunity of the defendants to commit the crime was tenuous, if not altogether absent. Here, on the other hand, defendant's opportunity was conclusively established. Uncontroverted evidence showed that she never left the mobile home from the time she went to bed until the time the police arrived pursuant to her emergency phone call. In the interim, her husband was shot in the head. The victim and defendant owned several pistols, and the police found each of them in the home; one of those pistols was the murder weapon.

In addition to showing that defendant had the opportunity to commit the crime, the evidence also tended to show that she made an inculpatory statement when she went to the funeral home to...