State v. Pierson

• Decision Date: 05 May 1995
• Docket Number: No. C5-94-1333,C5-94-1333
• Citation: 530 N.W.2d 784
• Parties: STATE of Minnesota, Respondent, v. Shane PIERSON, Appellant.
• Court: Minnesota Supreme Court

Page 784

530 N.W.2d 784

STATE of Minnesota, Respondent, v. Shane PIERSON, Appellant.

No. C5-94-1333.

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

May 5, 1995.

Syllabus by the Court

The evidence presented at trial was sufficient to sustain defendant's conviction for murder in the first degree.

John M. Stuart, State Public Defender, Mark F. Anderson, Asst. State Public Defender, Minneapolis, for appellant.

Hubert H. Humphrey, III, Atty. Gen., and Tom Foley, Ramsey County Atty., Darrell C. Hill, Asst. Ramsey County Atty., St. Paul, for respondent.

Heard, considered and decided by the court en banc.

OPINION

KEITH, Chief Justice.

Appellant, Shane Pierson, was convicted by a Ramsey County jury on one count of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder, and one count of aggravated robbery. ¹ Pierson raises the sole issue on appeal of whether the evidence presented at trial was sufficient as a matter of law to sustain his conviction for first-degree murder. We conclude that the evidence was sufficient, and we affirm the conviction.

On the evening of October 5, 1993, Raymond Barnett and his roommate left their home at 911 Dayton Avenue in St. Paul shortly before 10:00 p.m. and walked a block to King's Market on the corner of Selby Avenue and Milton Street. On their return home, they heard voices calling out to get their attention and saw three men running up behind them. Barnett and his roommate walked a short distance further and stopped on the sidewalk in front of their house to talk with the three men. Barnett later identified the men as appellant Shane Pierson, Carlos Smith and Antonius Hudspeth. One or two minutes later, Barnett's roommate left the group to go into the house, and almost immediately, the three men surrounded Barnett. At that moment, Barnett realized Smith was pointing a gun at his head. As Smith told Barnett to get on the ground, Hudspeth shouted "shoot him." During this time, Pierson was standing to one side of Barnett and did not say anything. When Barnett failed to comply with the order to get on the ground, Smith struck Barnett on the right side of his forehead with the gun, causing him to fall to the ground. Barnett believed he was "out" for a couple of seconds, and when he woke up, he was face-down in the grass and all three men were going through his clothing and beating him. One of the men was beating Barnett with some sort of stick or bat. Although Barnett could not see each individual man while he was face-down in the grass, he could feel that all three, including Pierson, participated in going through his pockets, taking his pager, ripping his pants off of him and beating him while he was on the ground. The last items taken were Barnett's tennis shoes. After the attack, the three men jogged south down the middle of Milton Street toward King's Market.

At roughly the same time, Dural Woods was standing on the corner in front of King's Market, and Michael Kirkwood had just arrived to use the telephone connected to the outside wall of the market. As Kirkwood picked up the telephone receiver, he looked up and saw three men running toward him, one of whom was carrying a pair of tennis shoes under his arm. Kirkwood and other witnesses later identified the men as Pierson, Smith and Hudspeth--the same three men identified as having robbed Barnett just moments earlier. Although the testimony conflicted somewhat, it appears that, immediately suspecting trouble, Kirkwood dropped the telephone and said "what's up" to the men four or five times. Believing he was about to be robbed, Kirkwood called to a friend across the street and stepped backwards away from the corner. As he reached his friend near the south curb of Selby Avenue, Kirkwood heard one of the men say "jack-move," a slang term for robbery, and he then saw Smith and Hudspeth hold Woods' arms while Pierson went through Woods' pockets. According to Kirkwood and his friend, Woods struggled and said "get off me." At that moment, Smith shot Woods once in the head while he was standing and three to five more times after Woods had fallen to the ground. During the shooting, Pierson stood at Woods' head and watched without attempting to leave or to stop Smith.

Immediately following the shooting, Pierson, Smith and Hudspeth jogged south on Milton Street, howling and cheering as they left. Moments later, witnesses who lived a block south of King's Market heard multiple doors slamming on a car that was parked on Milton Street south of Selby Avenue, and then saw a small tan station wagon turn the corner and proceed west on Hague Avenue at a high rate of speed. At least two occupants in the car were shouting as if in celebration and laughing raucously as they drove away.

At approximately 10:30 p.m., a "shots-fired" call was issued to St. Paul police officers in the area of Selby Avenue and Milton Street. Within minutes of the call, two officers in a patrol car spotted a brown station wagon heading north on Lexington Avenue at 40-45 miles per hour and turning west onto an I-94 access road. Having heard the call about the shooting, and because the vehicle did not slow down when it turned the corner onto the access road, the officers suspected that the occupants were trying to flee the area in a hurry. The officers followed the car onto westbound I-94 and, after receiving a description of the suspect vehicle and requesting backup assistance, stopped the car at the Riverside exit in Minneapolis. After police removed the occupants from the car, they identified the men as John Edmondson, Pierson, Smith and Hudspeth. Within an hour of the shooting, the police brought a witness of both the robbery of Barnett and the shooting of Woods to the Riverside exit, and he identified Pierson, Smith and Hudspeth as the men involved in both crimes. The car was later identified by Smith's mother as the one she had loaned to Edmondson, Pierson, Smith and Hudspeth earlier that evening, and was identified by witnesses as the one seen driving away from the scene of the shooting. Police searched the car and recovered three pagers, one of which was the pager taken from Barnett, a baseball bat, one of Barnett's tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt. All four men were arrested.

Also within minutes of the call, police arrived at the corner of Selby Avenue and Milton Street and found Woods lying face-down on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. The police recovered from the scene four shell casings, one live round, and Barnett's second tennis shoe. A medical examiner later determined that Woods died at 10:34 p.m. from multiple gunshot wounds.

In addition to the testimony of witnesses at the scene, the trial court admitted evidence regarding Pierson's activities before and after the Woods and Barnett incidents. First, Keith Richardson testified that he had a conversation with Pierson while both were in a Ramsey County Adult Detention Center holding cell some time after Pierson's arrest on October 5th. According to the testimony, Pierson and Richardson met while in the holding cell, and Pierson told Richardson he was being held for robbery and murder. Pierson then told Richardson that he had been with another person who had a confrontation with a third man, and the third man was shot. According to Richardson, Pierson said "that he figured that the guy would have gotten shot in the shoulder or the leg or something" and that he was present at the time of the shooting.

Second, Jerrold McWilliams testified that less than two weeks before the Woods shooting, on September 22, 1993, he was robbed on the street at gunpoint, and Pierson was one of the participants in the robbery. According to McWilliams, he was walking near the corner of Marshall and Grotto Streets in St. Paul after dark, and he was approached by a man who put a gun to his head. At that point, the man was joined by three others. The gunman asked McWilliams for drugs, and McWilliams responded that he wasn't a drug dealer and didn't have any. As the other three men went through McWilliams' pockets, the gunman instructed McWilliams to take off his coat and shoes, and one of the other men took his watch. He was then pushed to the ground, and the men walked away. McWilliams later identified Pierson as one of the men who robbed him, and he specifically recalled that Pierson had "stuck his hand in my pocket."

On appeal, Pierson challenges only the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his conviction for first-degree murder. In reviewing a sufficiency of the evidence claim, this court is limited to ascertaining whether, given the facts in the record and any legitimate inferences that can be drawn from those facts, a jury could reasonably find that the defendant was guilty of the charged offense. State v. Merrill, 274 N.W.2d 99, 111 (Minn.1978) (citations omitted). We do not retry the facts, but instead we view the evidence in a light most favorable to the jury's verdict and assume that the jury believed the state's witnesses and disbelieved any evidence to the contrary. Id.; State v. Merrill, 428 N.W.2d 361, 366 (Minn.1988). If the jury, giving due regard to the presumption of innocence and to the state's burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, could reasonably have found the defendant guilty, the verdict will not be disturbed. State v. Norgaard, 272 Minn. 48, 52, 136 N.W.2d 628, 632 (1965).

Minnesota Statutes section 609.185 (1994) provides in relevant part:

Whoever does any of the following is guilty of murder in the first degree and shall be sentenced to imprisonment for life:

* * * * * *

(3) causes the death of a human being with intent to effect the death of the person or another, while committing or attempting to commit * * * aggravated robbery * * *.

Although it is uncontroverted in the record that Smith actually fired the shots that killed Woods, the state contended at trial that Pierson was liable as...