State v. Pinder

• Decision Date: 04 March 2005
• Docket Number: No. 20030484.,20030484.
• Citation: 114 P.3d 551,2005 UT 15
• Parties: STATE of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. John R. PINDER, Defendant and Appellant.
• Court: Utah Supreme Court

114 P.3d 551

2005 UT 15

STATE of Utah, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. John R. PINDER, Defendant and Appellant.

No. 20030484.

Supreme Court of Utah.

March 4, 2005.

Rehearing Denied June 1, 2005.

Mark L. Shurtleff, Att'y Gen., Karen A. Klucznik, Asst. Att'y Gen., Salt Lake City, for plaintiff.

Brent A. Gold, Park City, Andrew Parnes, Ketchum, Idaho, for defendant.

DURRANT, Justice:

¶ 1 John R. Pinder was convicted on eleven felony counts in connection with the murders of June Flood and Rex Tanner. Pinder appeals those convictions and claims that a new trial is warranted because (1) the State failed to satisfy its constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense, (2) the trial judge made several erroneous evidentiary rulings, (3) a jury instruction failed to adequately inform the jury that the State had the burden to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt the affirmative defense of compulsion, and (4) new evidence uncovered after the conclusion of the trial is sufficiently compelling to make a different result on retrial probable. We conclude that a new trial is not warranted and therefore affirm the trial court's denial of Pinder's motion for a new trial.

BACKGROUND

¶ 2 "On appeal from a jury verdict, we view the evidence and all reasonable inferences in a light most favorable to that verdict and recite the facts accordingly." State v. Gordon, 913 P.2d 350, 351 (Utah 1996). We do so notwithstanding Pinder's assertion that newly discovered evidence undermines confidence in the trial proceedings. See State v. Loose, 2000 UT 11, ¶¶ 1-2, 994 P.2d 1237

(reciting the facts in a light most favorable to the jury verdict even though the defendant asserted a newly discovered evidence claim on appeal).

I. THE MURDERS OF JUNE FLOOD AND REX TANNER

¶ 3 Pinder owned a lion, which he kept in a pen on his Duchesne County ranch. Pinder kept a baseball bat, which he used to intimidate the beast, near the lion's pen. On a Sunday evening in late October 1998, Pinder used that bat to strike June Flood in the face, the first in a series of brutal and gruesome acts spanning several days, including a double murder and the implementation of a horrific scheme to destroy all evidence of the crime.

¶ 4 Pinder did not commit those acts alone. At trial, Filomeno Ruiz, an ostensible ranch hand, testified that he was present both when Pinder beat Flood and Rex Tanner with the baseball bat and when Pinder subsequently shot and killed the two victims.

¶ 5 Ruiz styled himself a member of the "Mexican Mafia" and was heavily involved in the drug trade. Pinder's primary purpose for keeping Ruiz at the ranch was to ensure a ready supply of drugs for his own use. At trial, Pinder conceded that Ruiz was a "drug smuggling, gun running, mafioso, wife beating, dog killer." Pinder additionally acknowledged that, while Ruiz did some work on the ranch — including feeding the ostriches and the ranch's resident lion — Ruiz was not supervised by Pinder's ranch hand supervisor. In fact, Pinder admitted that Ruiz did very little work at the ranch and agreed that Ruiz was no ordinary ranch hand, but was more akin to a personal employee. Pinder loaned his "personal employee" an AK-47¹ for "work on the ranch" and also provided him training in explosives. It was this personal employee who accompanied Pinder on the night he killed Flood and Tanner.

¶ 6 That night began benignly enough. Pinder and his live-in girlfriend, Barbara DeHart, along with Ruiz and Joe Wallen, Pinder's accountant, dropped in on another ranch employee, David Brunyer. The group gathered around Brunyer's campfire, talking and drinking beer. As the evening wound down, Pinder addressed Ruiz, saying, "let's go get some heads," a macabre reference to an earlier discussion in which Pinder had expressed that he had always wanted to own a shrunken head. Pinder, DeHart, Ruiz, and Wallen then departed and returned to the ranch. A short time later, Pinder informed DeHart that he and Ruiz were going to take a drive and have a "chat." Before the pair left the ranch, Pinder grabbed the baseball bat used for intimidating his lion and placed it in the truck. Pinder and Ruiz then drove to Flood's house, where they found both Flood and Tanner.

¶ 7 Pinder had sporadically employed Flood and Tanner. However, Tanner had ceased working for Pinder after injuring his leg in a horse accident, and Pinder had ordered Flood off the ranch after accusing her of playing a role in the theft of several documents that would have aided his estranged wife in a then-ongoing divorce dispute, which threatened the loss of the ranch. Pinder, "livid with anger," had later reported the theft to authorities. Pinder frequently spoke of his animosity toward Flood and Tanner and had even personally confronted and threatened the couple in connection with various disputes. At trial, the jury determined that Pinder put those threats into action on the evening he arrived at Flood's door, with Ruiz in tow and a baseball bat in hand.

¶ 8 After entering Flood's home, Pinder insisted that they all "go somewhere to talk." Flood and Tanner refused to leave and the confrontation quickly turned violent. Using his baseball bat, Pinder first hit Flood in the face and then struck Tanner in the leg. Pinder grabbed a rifle owned by Flood and pointed the weapon at his victims. Ruiz testified that Pinder looked as though "he had the devil" when wielding the weapon. Pinder, accompanied by Ruiz, then led the two injured victims, Flood holding her mouth and Tanner hobbling, to his pickup truck and drove to a nearby lake located on the ranch.

¶ 9 Pinder parked the truck by the lake, and all four occupants exited the vehicle. As the group walked toward the back of the truck, Pinder shot Flood twice, presumably with a pistol that had been located in the truck. Pinder then shot Tanner multiple times. The murders complete, Pinder began dragging the bodies to the cover of some nearby bushes. When he implored Ruiz to help move the bodies, Ruiz, previously frozen in fear, complied. After covering the bodies with the bushes, Pinder and Ruiz briefly returned to the ranch house before commencing a gruesome course of action intended to destroy all evidence of the murders.

II. THE AFTERMATH

¶ 10 At the time of the murders, Pinder owned a significant quantity of explosives, which he stored in caves relatively close to the ranch house. After their brief stop at the ranch house, Pinder and Ruiz drove to the caves and retrieved multiple bags of ammonium nitrate and several pieces of dynamite. Upon loading the explosives into the truck, Pinder and Ruiz returned to the site of the murders and began preparations to destroy the bodies of Flood and Tanner, as well as the rifle Pinder had taken from Flood's home.

¶ 11 Pinder piled the explosives on and around the victims, and placed the stolen rifle on top of the bodies. He then set off the explosion and returned to the ranch house with Ruiz. Once at the ranch house, Pinder cleaned his gun and burned the clothes he and Ruiz had been wearing that evening.

¶ 12 The following day, Pinder returned to the blast site and bulldozed the area until his bulldozer ran out of fuel. Later that night, Pinder, Ruiz, and DeHart went to Brunyer's residence for dinner. On their way to dinner, the group picked up several black bags, which they transported to the ranch dump and burned. Pinder informed Ruiz that the bags contained one of Tanner's legs and a shoe. After dinner, Pinder and Ruiz continued their efforts to rid the ranch of evidence, collecting additional body parts in black bags, which they then placed in a barrel located away from the site of the initial detonation. They destroyed the barrel using explosives.

¶ 13 The following morning, Brunyer became involved in the effort to cover up the double murder. Brunyer arrived at the ranch in order to do some welding, but Pinder requested that he first retrieve a fuel truck from Tanner's trailer in order to refuel the bulldozer Pinder had used in his efforts to bury evidence and disguise the blast site. Brunyer left with Wallen to comply with the request, but was stopped by Ruiz as he and Wallen were returning to the ranch house with the fuel truck. Ruiz spoke briefly with Wallen, who was driving the fuel truck, before Wallen continued driving to the ranch. After Wallen's departure, Ruiz approached Brunyer. Ruiz handed Brunyer some paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and told him that Pinder needed him to wipe down Flood's home to remove any fingerprints. Per Pinder's instructions, Brunyer and Ruiz first went to the ranch house to drop off Pinder's truck, which Ruiz had been driving, and then returned to Flood's home in Brunyer's truck.

¶ 14 After attempting to clean Flood's home of fingerprints, Brunyer and Ruiz drove to the site of the murders and helped Pinder refuel the bulldozer, further disguise the blast site, and remove evidence. While at the blast site, Brunyer discovered a relatively large portion of Tanner's torso, to which Tanner's head remained attached. However, Brunyer did not draw attention to his discovery, disturb the remains, or tell Ruiz or Pinder about it. After learning of the murders and aiding in the cover-up, Brunyer feared for his life and spent the subsequent three nights in his wood stack with his rifle.

¶ 15 Soon after these events, a friend of Flood expressed her concern that Flood was missing, and a police investigation was initiated. Thereafter, while pursuing the investigation, Sergeant Wallace Hendricks entered Flood's home. He found the residence in disarray. The refrigerator was pulled away from the wall, pots and pans were on the floor, and blood stained the backrest of a living room chair and the sheets of a fold-out bed.

¶ 16 After leaving Flood's home, Sergeant Hendricks noticed a group of people standing around a nearby trailer and stopped to determine if anyone had information about the whereabouts of...