State v. Lang
| Decision Date | 13 May 1993 |
| Docket Number | No. 1,CA-CR,1 |
| Citation | 176 Ariz. 475,862 P.2d 235 |
| Parties | STATE of Arizona, Appellee, v. Carl J. LANG, Sr., Appellant. 91-0826. |
| Court | Arizona Court of Appeals |
The defendant, Carl J. Lang, Sr., appeals his conviction for first-degree murder. We reverse and remand for a new trial because improper contact between a key prosecution witness and members of the jury deprived the defendant of the right to trial by a fair and impartial jury. A detailed knowledge of the facts is important to a resolution of the several issues raised, and to an understanding of why the misconduct was prejudicial.
The defendant and the victim were married in 1984. The victim grew dissatisfied with the relationship, and she began having romantic affairs with other men. In 1987, the defendant found a note in the victim's handwriting saying, "I live with one man and love another." The defendant confronted the victim with the note, but she brushed it off, and nothing immediate came of the episode.
The couple separated in October of 1988, although they continued to have an amicable, and sometimes even intimate, relationship over the next few months. In late December of 1988, the victim first told the defendant of her relationships with other men. Although the defendant knew a divorce was likely, he continued to see the victim.
On a day in late February 1989, the victim returned to Phoenix from an overnight business trip to Tucson. The victim's daughter from a previous marriage, who resided with the victim, arrived home that night at about 9:00 p.m. She found a note from the victim stating that she had gone to a 7:00 p.m. meeting and would be home by 9:00 p.m. The daughter changed her clothes, wrote a note to the victim, and left the house by 9:30 p.m. When the daughter returned home around 2:20 a.m., the victim's car was in the garage. Everything else appeared normal, so the daughter went to bed.
The daughter awoke at about 7:00 a.m. the next morning. Believing that the victim was still asleep, she left another note and went to a business meeting. When she returned at approximately 9:00 a.m., she saw the defendant stepping out of the house into the garage. The defendant had earlier made plans with the daughter to work on the daughter's car that weekend, and the two began to do that. The daughter asked the defendant where her mother was, and he said he didn't know. When the defendant left to get a part for the car, the daughter went into the house and decided to check on the victim. She found the victim lying dead at the foot of the victim's bed. The bed sheets were covered with blood, and the room had been ransacked. The police arrived within minutes, and it was later determined that the victim had been killed sometime during the preceding night. A receipt from an automatic teller machine located near the victim's home showed that someone, presumably the victim, had withdrawn $20 from her account at 9:30 p.m. on the night she was murdered.
The investigation showed that the victim had been beaten with a blunt, threaded object, but the cause of death was strangulation by ligature. The investigation, which focused on the defendant, uncovered several circumstantial leads. There was no sign of forced entry, and only the victim's bedroom had been ransacked. There was a cigarette crushed into the bedroom carpet, which bore evidence derived from saliva indicating that the defendant, who was a smoker, could have been, but was not necessarily, the person who had smoked it.
The only things missing from the room were the victim's wedding rings. The defendant later produced these, claiming that he found them on a closet shelf in the victim's bedroom while helping to clean it. The daughter and a police detective had previously searched that shelf and found nothing.
The police recovered an anonymous letter which had been sent to the victim's employer by a person claiming to be the wife of one of the company's clients. The letter revealed that the victim was having an affair with the sender's husband and suggested that the victim be fired. The defendant's fingerprints were on the letter and the envelope in which it had been sent.
The defendant voluntarily submitted to three separate interviews with the police, the first two of which yielded nothing the police considered incriminating. The third interrogation lasted most of the day of Thursday, March 9, 1989, during which the defendant, according to the police, made several partial admissions to the crime. The interrogation was not tape-recorded, and the defendant denies that he made the statements the police characterize as admissions. The statements are described in more detail below.
The defendant was ultimately charged with the murder. His jury trial lasted six weeks. The state had many witnesses. Among them was the victim's daughter, who testified about the relationship between her mother and the defendant and about the events leading to her finding her mother's body. An expert witness testified concerning attempts to find fingerprints at the death scene and about the letter which the defendant had allegedly sent to the victim's employer.
The critical witnesses were the two detectives to whom the defendant had purportedly made incriminating statements. Detective Mark Jones had taken the lead in the third interrogation. During most of the questioning, Detective Don Byers was also present. According to the detectives, the defendant was questioned all day on March 9 until around 4:30 p.m., when he asked them whether he was going to be arrested that day. According to the defendant, he told the detectives that he did not want to answer any more questions. At that time, the defendant became emotional, and according to both detectives, the defendant told them that he would leave for the weekend, talk to his sons and sister and get his affairs in order, and that he would return on Monday and would "solve the [victim's] homicide for you." Both detectives testified that the defendant said there was a lot of information they did not know, that things had started about two years earlier when he found the note his wife had written about living with one man and loving another, and that he would tell them everything they needed to know to resolve the case. The defendant had a different version of what he said. According to him, he simply told the detectives that if they would just let him leave, he would come back whenever they wanted and answer any questions they had.
At this point, Detective Jones left the room to seek an opinion from the county attorney as to whether there was enough evidence to arrest the defendant. The defendant had given the detectives the keys to his apartment and his car so they could search them. While he understood that he was free to leave, he decided to go with Detective Byers to get something to eat. After eating, Byers and the defendant again met with Detective Jones. According to Jones' testimony at trial, he asked the defendant what he did with the weapon he used to kill the victim, and the defendant replied that he could not tell them exactly but that it would be found in a field, and he would tell them more on Monday. Again, the defendant had a different version of what he said. He testified that when Jones asked him where they might be able to find the pipe, he, the defendant, became angry that they were continuing to question him and facetiously said that maybe they could find it in a field somewhere.
Following this, the detectives and the defendant went to the defendant's apartment so the detectives could search it. Detective Jones testified that the defendant told them that nothing they were looking for would be found in the apartment except for the rings, which the defendant said he was keeping until the victim's children decided what to do with them.
According to Jones, when Jones asked the defendant which clothes he had worn on the night the victim was murdered, the defendant replied that they had been discarded. When asked why, the defendant said, "It seemed like the right thing to do." The defendant, at trial, testified that he told Jones that since relatives were staying with him at the time of the funeral, he discarded a lot of clothes to make room in a closet and that the clothes he wore on the night of the murder may have been among these. The defense was also able to show that Detective Jones had described his question about the clothes in different ways on different occasions.
Detective Jones also testified that he asked the defendant which vehicle he drove to the victim's house the night of the murder, and the defendant replied that he had driven his truck. The defendant's version of this question was that he was simply asked what vehicle he was driving on the night his wife was killed. He insisted that he had always denied that he had been at the victim's house on the night of the murder.
At trial, the defense questioned the sufficiency of the state's evidence. Much of the defense effort was directed at casting doubt on the detectives' testimony about the statements the defendant had allegedly made to them. The state called Detective Byers, who was designated as the state's investigating officer and who remained at counsel table during the trial as a witness. His testimony was consistent with Detective Jones' version of the defendant's statement about solving the case for them, about telling the police everything they needed to know, about telling them that there was a lot they did not know, and the defendant's having said that everything had started when he found the letter. The...
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