State v. Williams

• Decision Date: 10 September 1993
• Docket Number: No. 264A90,264A90
• Citation: 434 S.E.2d 588,334 N.C. 440
• Court: North Carolina Supreme Court
• Parties: STATE of North Carolina v. Marvin Earl WILLIAMS, Jr.

Page 588

434 S.E.2d 588

334 N.C. 440

STATE of North Carolina v. Marvin Earl WILLIAMS, Jr.

No. 264A90.

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Sept. 10, 1993.

Lacy H. Thornburg, Atty. Gen. by Isaac T. Avery, III, Sp. Deputy Atty. Gen., and Linda Anne Morris, Asst. Atty. Gen., Raleigh, for the State.

William F.W. Massengale and Marilyn G. Ozer, Chapel Hill, for defendant-appellant.

EXUM, Chief Justice.

After a trial in which he was convicted of the murder of Theron Price, of burglary with explosives and of attempted safe-cracking, defendant was sentenced to death. He now raises numerous assignments of error spanning both the guilt-innocence and the sentencing phases of the trial. We find one of these meritorious and therefore grant him a new trial.

I

Defendant introduced no evidence at trial. The State's evidence tended to show the facts narrated below.

In the early morning of 12 February 1989, Lewis Rich, a security guard for Dewey Brothers, Inc., arrived at the company's premises for his 12:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. shift to find the guardhouse gate locked. Unable to enter the premises or locate Theron Price, the guard he was scheduled to relieve, Rich telephoned Richard Helms, the company president. Helms arrived shortly and opened the gate. Helms found the door to the payroll office partially open, a light emanating from within, and just outside the office door an acetylene torch and a cart bearing oxygen and acetylene tanks. Helms then summoned the police. Inside the payroll office, the police observed a floor safe illuminated by a gooseneck lamp. There was carbon on the safe's hinges and knob. The police determined that the torch was improperly adjusted, that it would have created a lot of smoke and carbon but would not have cut metal.

Joining the police in a search of the rest of the premises, Helms discovered Theron Price. Lifeless, Price was lying on his back in the steel shed next to the payroll office, and had blood on his face and head. Parallel lines in the dirt indicated he had been dragged into the shed. Various of his possessions, including his time clock, were nearby, as were a yellow hard hat and a welder's mask. The time clock, hard hat and welder's mask had blood on them. There were cracks in the fiberglass of the welder's mask, and, in the cracks, gray hairs. Also found on the scene were Reebok tennis shoe impressions leading to the building which housed the acetylene torches and related equipment. The lock on the cabinet where the torches were kept had been cut off.

Several days after the discovery of Price's body, an employee of Dewey Brothers named Angelo Farmer reported to his supervisors that he knew the identity of the killer. According to Farmer, he and defendant had discussed breaking into Dewey Brothers and robbing its safe in the early part of February. On 11 February, defendant asked Farmer whether he was "ready to move." When Farmer indicated that he was not, defendant said, "I'm gone. I'm on my move." The next day, after learning of Price's death, Farmer confronted defendant, saying: "Damn man. You killed a man." Defendant said he did not mean to do it. When Farmer remarked that defendant could have tied Price up, defendant replied that he had wanted to but "the man kept coming."

Having revealed this information, Farmer agreed to cooperate with the police. The police furnished him with a tape recording device. Wearing the device, Farmer engaged defendant in conversation about the crimes. During the conversation, defendant said he had tried to break into Dewey Brothers' safe using an acetylene torch he found on the premises. When surprised by the watchman, he had pulled a knife but the guard had "kept coming." He had then taken the guard's time clock and hit him with it "two or three times." Defendant further stated: "I got scared then, but then I thought about the money. I kept checking on him and he had not come back to. I knew I had done killed the m----- f----- then." Defendant had continued to work on the safe and had checked on the guard more than once. When he heard a truck pull up, and later a car, defendant had attempted to wipe away his fingerprints and hide some of the evidence, and had then fled.

The police obtained a warrant based on Farmer's allegations and the tape recording and arrested defendant at a boarding house called the Salem Lodge. The police seized defendant's clothing and some of his possessions. The shoes he was wearing matched the footprints found at Dewey Brothers. Other than the shoes, however, the police obtained no physical evidence tending to link defendant to the crime scene.

An autopsy of the victim's body revealed several wounds on the face and head caused by blunt force trauma and a small laceration on each hand. The wounds on the face would have caused mild to moderate pain. The wounds on the head resulted in skull fractures and could have caused death. Two of these wounds would have required the force of a five-pound steel ball dropped from seven to twelve feet. The victim may have been conscious during the infliction of all the wounds, and for two to five minutes thereafter, and may have been hit while lying on the ground. The victim probably lived for five to ten minutes after the fatal blows were struck.

Defendant was convicted of first-degree murder on theories of felony murder, the underlying felony being burglary with explosives, and premeditation and deliberation. He was also convicted of burglary with explosives and attempted safe-cracking. After a sentencing hearing, the jury recommended and the trial court imposed a sentence of death. The trial court also sentenced defendant to thirty years' imprisonment on the burglary conviction, but arrested the attempted safe-cracking judgment.

II

Defendant contends, and we agree, that the trial judge gave the jury an unconstitutional instruction on the meaning of "reasonable doubt." The challenged instruction, given midway through the jury's deliberations in response to a juror's request for clarification, was taken almost verbatim from State v. Hammonds, 241 N.C. 226, 232, 85 S.E.2d 133, 138 (1954). The instruction stated:

When it is said that the jury must be satisfied of the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, it is meant that they must be fully satisfied or entirely convinced or to put it another way, satisfied to a moral certainty of the truth of the charge. If, after considering, comparing and weighing all the evidence, the minds of the jurors are left in such condition that they cannot say they have an abiding faith to a moral certainty in the defendant's guilt, then they have a reasonable doubt, otherwise not. A reasonable doubt as that term is employed in the administration of criminal law, is a[n] honest substantial misgiving generated by the insufficiency of the proof, an insufficiency which fails to convince your judgment and conscience and satisfy your reason as to the guilt of the accused.

In the recent case of State v. Bryant, 334 N.C. 333, 432 S.E.2d 291 (1993), we held that the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Cage v. Louisiana, 498 U.S. 39, 111 S.Ct. 328, 112 L.Ed.2d 339 (1990), and Sullivan v. Louisiana, 508 U.S. 275, 113 S.Ct. 2078, 124 L.Ed.2d 182 (1993), required us to declare an essentially identical instruction violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and plain error warranting a new trial. Our decision in Bryant controls this issue and requires that we grant defendant a new trial.

III

Though the instructional error is dispositive of this appeal, we must also discuss defendant's contention that the trial court should have dismissed the first-degree murder charge for insufficiency of the evidence. Were his contention correct, he would be shielded from further prosecution on this charge by the Double Jeopardy Clause of the United States Constitution. State v. Silhan, 302 N.C. 223, 267, 275 S.E.2d 450, 480 (1981). In addition, we will discuss those issues likely to arise again at defendant's next trial.

A

Defendant contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion to dismiss the first-degree murder charge since there was insufficient evidence of premeditation and deliberation. We disagree.

In measuring the sufficiency of the evidence, all evidence admitted, whether competent or incompetent, must be considered in the light most favorable to the State, giving the State the benefit of every reasonable inference to be drawn from the evidence and resolving in its favor any contradictions in the evidence. A motion to dismiss is properly denied if the evidence, when viewed in the above light, is such that a rational trier of fact could find beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of each element of the crime charged. State v. Brown, 310 N.C. 563, 566, 313 S.E.2d 585, 587 (1984); State v. Sumpter, 318 N.C. 102, 107-08, 347 S.E.2d 396, 399 (1986).

A killing is "premeditated" if the defendant contemplated killing for some period of time, however short, before he acted. It is "deliberate" if the defendant acted "in a cool state of blood," free from any "violent passion suddenly aroused by some lawful or just cause or legal provocation." State v. Fields, 315 N.C. 191, 200, 337 S.E.2d 518, 524 (1985) (quoting State v. Lowery, 309 N.C. 763, 768, 309 S.E.2d 232, 237 (1983)). The defendant need not have been placid or unemotional. Rather, whatever passion he felt must not have been such as to overwhelm his faculties and reason. State v. Williams, 308 N.C. 47, 68, 301 S.E.2d 335, 348-49, cert. denied, 464 U.S. 865, 104 S.Ct. 202, 78 L.Ed.2d 177, reh'g denied, 464 U.S. 1004, 104 S.Ct. 518, 78 L.Ed.2d 704 (1983).

Whether a killing was premeditated and deliberate may usually be answered only by resort to circumstantial evidence. State v. Williams, 308 N.C. at 68-69, 301 S.E.2d at 349. Among the circumstances generally considered probative on the point, the following are directly applicable to the facts of this case: 1)...