State v. Sappington
| Decision Date | 02 November 2007 |
| Docket Number | No. 94,415.,94,415. |
| Citation | 169 P.3d 1096 |
| Parties | STATE of Kansas, Appellee, v. Marc Vincent SAPPINGTON, Appellant. |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
Sarah Ellen Johnson, of Kansas Appellate Defender Office, argued the cause and was on the brief for appellant.
Jerome A. Gorman, district attorney, argued the cause, and Paul J. Morrison, attorney general, was with him on the brief for appellee.
Marc Vincent Sappington directly appeals his convictions of three counts of first-degree murder, one count of kidnapping, and one count of aggravated burglary against four different victims. Our jurisdiction is under K.S.A. 22-3601(b)(1), conviction of an off-grid crime.
Approximately 2 months after these convictions, Sappington was also convicted of first-degree felony murder and attempted aggravated robbery for a different episode. His appeal from those convictions is the subject of State v. Sappington, ___ Kan. ___, 169 P.3d 1107, 2007 WL 3225366 (2007).
The issues on appeal, and this court's accompanying holdings, are as follows:
1. Did the district court err in failing to instruct the jury on the defense of voluntary intoxication? No.
2. Did the district court err in refusing to grant Sappington's request for new counsel? No.
3. Did the district court err in refusing to allow the defense to put on certain evidence about Sappington's mother's schizophrenia? No.
4. Did the district court err in refusing to declare a mistrial after the State began to play the videotape of the wrong confession in open court? No.
Accordingly, we affirm the district court and convictions.
Between April 7 and April 10, 2001, three young men in a Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood were murdered and a woman was kidnapped. Marc Sappington confessed to the crimes, and many of the following facts are contained in his confession.
Early in the morning of April 7, 2001, Sappington killed Terry Green by stabbing him at least four times in Sappington's back yard. Sappington was afraid that someone had seen what he did, so he covered the body with a blue tarp and placed it in the back of Green's car. He then parked the car in an antiques mall parking lot in Kansas City, Missouri. The car and Green's body were discovered in the afternoon of April 10, 2001.
On the morning of April 10, 2001, Michael Weaver's body was found slumped in the front seat of a car parked in an alley near his house.
Weaver and Eric Fennix, Sappington's best friend, were step-brothers. Alice Wilson, Fennix's mother, testified that she lived in a house with Fennix, Fennix's fiancé, Myah, and Weaver. Wilson was awakened early in the morning of April 10 when Sappington knocked on the front door, saying he needed a screwdriver. She told him to look in the kitchen. He watched television with Wilson for awhile then went upstairs to get a jacket. About 10 minutes later he ran down the stairs and out the back door.
After Sappington left Fennix's house, he stayed in the back yard for several minutes as voices in his head told him to eat flesh. Weaver arrived in the yard a few minutes later. Using a knife Sappington had grabbed while in Fennix's kitchen, he stabbed Weaver. The wound went from Weaver's back completely through his chest. Weaver tried to get in his car and drive away, but crashed into a light pole. A neighbor was awakened by the crash and called the police. Within moments, Sappington heard sirens, so he attempted to move the car away from the accident scene. He abandoned it in a nearby alley before the police arrived.
Sappington claims that he had not satisfied the commanding voices in his head, so he killed Fred Alton Brown on April 10 as well. Just hours after killing Weaver, Sappington invited Brown to come to his house and smoke some "wet." The two went to Sappington's basement, where Sappington shot him in the back with a shotgun. Sappington cut off a piece of Brown's leg and tried to eat it. It made him sick, so he went upstairs and fried it. He ate the cooked flesh and drank some of Brown's blood. Sappington then used a maul and knife to dismember the body.
Around 9:30 p.m. on April 10, Anita Washington, who lived in the same neighborhood, returned home from the grocery store. While she was parked in her driveway, Sappington knocked on her car window and pointed a gun at her. He got in the back seat and told her to drive to Kansas City, Missouri. Sappington kept saying that he was a "dead man." At some point, he told Washington to pull over so he could drive. After doing so, she exited the car and ran to the nearest house, where she called the police.
Sappington was apprehended on April 12, 2001. He was taken to the police station where he was Mirandized and then confessed to all three homicides as well as the kidnapping. The confession was videotaped. After confessing, Sappington took detectives to where he had dumped a piece of Weaver's t-shirt, the keys to Weaver's car, and to another location where he had dumped the keys to Green's car. He was later charged with three counts of first-degree murder and with one count each of kidnapping and aggravated burglary.
Sappington suffers from schizophrenia and admitted using PCP (phencyclidine) during April 2001. In addition to hearing voices telling him to "eat flesh and drink blood" or he would die, he also claims that during that time he suffered from other aural and visual hallucinations. He relied upon the "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect" defense, claiming that his schizophrenia rendered him incapable of possessing the required criminal intent to commit the charged offenses.
The case was continued several times over 3 years because of alternating periods of Sappington's competency/incompetency. Sappington was evaluated primarily by Dr. William S. Logan, a psychiatrist, who met with Sappington 13 times over that entire period. Sappington was ultimately deemed competent to stand trial in July 2004 and went to trial later that month.
Through Dr. Logan's evaluations, he determined that Sappington suffered from schizophrenia at the time of trial, but he was not able to definitively state that Sappington suffered from schizophrenia in April 2001. Dr. Logan also testified that the effects of PCP use and the symptoms of schizophrenia are virtually the same.
In July 2004, a jury found Sappington guilty of all charges. He received consecutive sentences of three life terms for the first-degree murders, 79 months for the kidnapping, and 32 months for the aggravated burglary.
More facts will be added as necessary to the analysis.
Sappington admits that he relied solely upon the defense of mental disease or defect under K.S.A. 22-3220. Nevertheless, he contends that the district court erred in failing to independently instruct the jury on the voluntary intoxication defense because there was evidence indicating that he was suffering from a PCP-induced psychosis at the time he committed these crimes. The State responds that Sappington did not request this instruction and accordingly the failure to provide it was not clearly erroneous.
We agree that Sappington did not request or object at trial to the omission of a voluntary intoxication instruction; therefore, a clearly erroneous standard would typically apply. K.S.A.2006 Supp. 22-3414(3); State v. Cooperwood, 282 Kan. 572, 581, 147 P.3d 125 (2006). Instructions are clearly erroneous if the appellate court finds "` '" Cooperwood, 282 Kan. at 581, 147 P.3d 125.
As evidentiary support for the instruction, Sappington argues that when first interviewed in late April 2001, he told Dr. Logan that he attributed the command voices in his head to his PCP use. He also told the police that he was using PCP regularly throughout April 2001, and he claimed that the command voices coincided with heavy PCP use. In his confession, Sappington told the detectives he had been "smoking wet" prior to the crimes. Additionally, during the State's cross-examination of Dr. Logan, the prosecutor asked,
Sappington reinforces his evidentiary support by showing that during the State's closing argument, the prosecutor himself appeared to claim that Sappington's behavior was not due to the mental disease of schizophrenia but due to his voluntary use of PCP. The prosecutor then further appeared to argue that voluntary intoxication was no defense, telling the jury:
....
....
"[W]e have evidence through his own statement that he was using drugs and it was the drugs that caused it...." (Emphasis added.)
Apparently the prosecutor was attempting to make the point that under Sappington's sole theory of defense in this particular case, voluntary...
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