State v. Staten
| Decision Date | 12 August 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 108,305,108,305 |
| Citation | 377 P.3d 427,304 Kan. 957 |
| Parties | State of Kansas, Appellee, v. Michael Staten, Appellant. |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
Michael P. Whalen, of Law Office of Michael P. Whalen, of Wichita, argued the cause, and Rebecca L. Kurz, of The Kurz Law Office, LLC, of Mission, was on the brief for appellant.
Jennifer S. Tatum, assistant district attorney, argued the cause, and Jerome A. Gorman, district attorney, and Derek Schmidt, attorney general, were with her on the brief for appellee.
Michael Staten was convicted by a jury of one count of aggravated battery. The Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction, and we granted review.
Staten and Yvonne Williamson shared an apartment in Wyandotte County. In the early morning of July 22, 2011, the two engaged in an altercation that left Williamson severely injured. Witnesses disagreed on the circumstances leading up to the altercation, resulting in two distinct narratives, which we set out below.
Williamson and other witnesses recalled the following sequence of the events.
Williamson testified that on July 21, she got off work around 9 p.m. and went home to cook dinner. Staten was already home, and they got into an argument. Williamson decided to leave and walk to a nearby liquor store in order to keep the argument from escalating. Upon returning home with her purchase, the argument became more heated, and she again left, this time to visit a friend, where she talked, watched television, drank some brandy, smoked some marijuana, and consumed some cocaine.
Early the next morning, around 1:30 a.m., she returned to her apartment, feeling anxious and anticipating a continued argument with Staten. When she arrived, Staten was angry and had been drinking. He told her to get her belongings and leave. She packed her clothes, and he threw them out onto the back porch. While she was putting her clothes in her car, he attempted to lock her out of the house. He came outside about 20 minutes later and persuaded her to return to the apartment.
Once inside, they began to argue again. Staten grabbed her keys, and she called him a “bitch.” He hit her in the face with the keys, and then he pulled her into the bathroom, where he began beating her so hard that she started to bleed profusely. When he grabbed her by the hair, she bit him in an attempt to make him release her, and he put his arm around her neck in a chokehold. He informed her that he was going to kill her and then turn himself in to authorities in the morning. He finally released her when he got up to get something, and she ran outside and shouted for help.
Staten followed her outside and started swinging a stick at her. The stick had a nail protruding from one end. As she was trying to protect herself from the blows, one of her knuckles was broken. After he had hit her several times with the stick and his fist, she fell to the ground. He continued to hit her and kick her and told her that he would kill her, that she did not deserve to live, and that nobody would want her when he was through with her. She lay still until an ambulance arrived.
She was hospitalized for 4 days. In addition to receiving scars and bruises, she suffered a puncture wound near her lung, and she eventually received surgery for an injury to one eye. She denied having threatened or attacked Staten and testified that she bit him only after he grabbed her hair.
A neighbor, Emmanuel Rivera, testified that he was awakened by his dog barking and looked out his apartment window to see Staten “beating the crap out of a woman.” He reported that Staten was hitting the woman so hard with a stick that the stick broke and part of it flew away some distance. He saw Staten continue to hit her with the broken stick, then kick her, and then drag her around on the ground. In Rivera's opinion, it appeared that Staten was hitting and kicking the woman so hard that he was trying to kill her. Rivera shouted to him that he should stop or Rivera would call the police. Staten hit the woman a few more times and then threw the stick into a neighbor's yard. Rivera never saw the woman attack or attempt to hit Staten; she lacked the strength to do that, and she was unable to defend herself. While the woman screamed for help, Staten called her a “whore” and told her he was going to kill her. When emergency vehicles approached, Rivera saw Staten go back inside.
Edward Miller, a neighbor and acquaintance of Staten and Williamson, spent the evening of July 22 hanging out with Staten and a third man outside the apartment. They listened to music and waited for Williamson to return home. Around midnight, the three parted company and went into their respective apartments. Later, Miller's fiancé woke him and told him he needed to go get Staten. Going outside, Miller heard a lot of yelling and saw Williamson lying in the middle of the parking lot. She was bloody but speaking in a normal voice. Staten was shouting that “she deserved it.” Miller pulled Staten away from Williamson and tried to stay between them. Staten went back inside his apartment, and Miller stayed outside until the police and ambulance arrived.
Miller's fiancé, Nicole Vaughn, also witnessed some of the events. After hearing some noise in the parking lot, she looked out her apartment window and saw Staten with his hand raised as if he was preparing to strike Williamson. She woke Miller up, ran downstairs, and called the police. Williamson was seated or lying “helpless” on the ground, and Staten was standing over her. Vaughn saw no aggressive behavior on Williamson's part. Instead, she watched Staten kick Williamson and hit her several times, either with his fist or with a stick with a sharp object on the end. She also heard Staten say, “[T]his bitch deserves to die.” After Staten returned to his apartment, Vaughn walked over to Williamson, who was unrecognizable because there was so much blood and because her hair was matted to her head and her face was so swollen.
Staten testified to a different version of the events and subsequent altercation .
On the evening of July 21, Staten saw another man escorting Williamson home across the parking lot. When she arrived back in the apartment, Staten and Williamson had a tense encounter, and Williamson then left for several hours.
She returned to the apartment around 1:15 in the morning. When she arrived, Staten was in the living room. She grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and walked into the bedroom. Staten followed her, intending to ask about the earlier situation, but she was on the telephone and he decided to wait. He told her they could discuss the matter later in the morning, and she agreed, so he returned to the front room to get ready for bed. He got in bed around 1:25, while Williamson stayed up and played a computer game.
Around 3 a.m., Williamson walked toward the kitchen and kicked the futon mattress on which Staten was sleeping. Returning from the kitchen, she told him that he did not have to worry about her staying because she was leaving. He went into the bedroom and saw that she had packed her clothes. He told her that packing her clothes meant she was ready to leave, so he took two bags of clothing and set them on the back porch, along with some of her other belongings. When she went to see where he had put her belongings, he locked her out of the bedroom, hoping that some time alone would defuse her antagonism.
When Staten heard Williamson putting things in her car, he locked her out of the apartment because he was concerned that she was agitated and confrontational. Then he went outside to talk with her after she had calmed down. After they talked for about 20 minutes, he went around to the front to smoke a cigar while she went back inside. He saw her take his keys and start to drop them in her purse, at which time he grabbed the key chain and snatched the keys out of her purse.
Williamson ran toward him, called him a “bitch,” and grabbed his keys. Staten warned her that he would call the police, whereupon Williamson grabbed his right hand and bit him on the right ring finger. As she bit down, he grabbed her in a headlock in an attempt to make her release his finger. After she finally let go, he got up and went into the living room to get his cell phone to call the police. While he was trying to unplug his phone from its charger, Williamson ran up and hit him with a stick that they had been using to hang laundry. She hit him on the head and in the face and chased him out of the apartment.
They both tripped over a bicycle railing, and he wrestled the stick away from her and hit her. She ran back toward him, so he hit her again in order to protect himself. Williamson said she was going to kill him, and he thought he was going to die. It was only after he had struck her several times that she became subdued enough to cease her attack, and he returned to the apartment.
The verdict and sentence
A jury found Staten guilty of one count of aggravated battery, and he was sentenced to a standard term of 154 months and ordered to pay $27,000 in restitution. He took a timely appeal to the Court of Appeals, which affirmed the conviction. State v. Staten , No. 108305, 2015 WL 423644 (Kan. App. 2015) (unpublished opinion). This court granted review with respect to all issues.
AnalysisJury instruction on burden of proof for self-defense
Staten first complains that the jury instructions failed to inform the jury properly what the burden of proof was and who bore it. He asserted a self-defense theory at trial. He contends that the district court committed reversible error by failing to instruct the jury that the State was required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not act in self-defense. While the district court gave a general burden of proof instruction, it did not instruct specifically how the reasonable-doubt standard should apply to the self-defense instruction. Staten maintains that, despite his...
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