Stevens v. State
| Decision Date | 14 September 1982 |
| Docket Number | No. 57738,57738 |
| Citation | 419 So.2d 1058 |
| Parties | Rufus Eugene STEVENS, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
John R. Forbes, Jacksonville, for appellant.
Jim Smith, Atty. Gen. and Raymond L. Marky, Asst. Atty. Gen., Tallahassee, for appellee.
This cause is before the Court on appeal from a judgment of the Circuit Court of the Fourth Judicial Circuit in and for Duval County. The appellant was convicted of murder in the first degree. After receiving the jury's recommendation of a sentence of life imprisonment, the trial court sentenced appellant to death. This Court has jurisdiction of the appeal. Art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla.Const. We affirm the judgment and sentence.
During the early morning hours of March 13, 1979, Eleanor Kathy Tolin, while working as cashier at an all-night convenience store, was robbed, abducted, raped, and killed. The appellant Rufus Stevens and his friend Scott Engle were jointly indicted on a charge of first-degree murder. The two defendants were tried separately.
Appellant was arrested at his home at about 3:30 a.m. on March 20, 1979. Later that morning appellant signed a confession admitting participation in the robbery, abduction, and rape, but placing the blame for the murder on Engle. Before trial, appellant moved to suppress his confession on the ground that his state of severe intoxication at the time rendered his statement involuntary. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, appellant testified that during the day and evening preceding his arrest and interrogation, he consumed one and one-half to two cases of beer and some whiskey. An expert testified that such a level of alcohol consumption would have an extremely debilitating effect on a normal person's cognitive and motor processes. The state presented testimony that at about midnight on the night of his arrest, by which time most of the alcohol consumption appellant testified to would have been completed, appellant was able to converse coherently and drive a car. The arresting officer and the interrogating officer testified that at the time of arrest and during questioning, appellant was intelligible and capable of coherent conversation. In conjunction with his motion to suppress, appellant asked for an opportunity to reproduce the effects of the alcohol ingestion he testified to, in order to demonstrate to the court his mental state at the time of his confession. The court declined to allow such test or demonstration and denied the motion to suppress.
Based on appellant's confession in which he admitted participation in the robbery and abduction but blamed the actual killing on Engle, the state indicated a willingness to allow appellant to plead guilty in exchange for a recommended sentence of life imprisonment rather than death, or to plead guilty to a lesser, non-capital offense. As a condition precedent to such a plea bargain, the state demanded a polygraph examination for the purpose of determining the extent of appellant's participation in the criminal episode leading to the murder. Appellant agreed to submit to the polygraph test.
At the place and time scheduled for the examination, only appellant and the police polygraph examiner were present. Before being connected to the machine, appellant spontaneously made some statements concerning his participation in the crime. The immediate result of appellant's utterances was that the examiner did not proceed with the examination. A further result was that the state discontinued the plea negotiations, since appellant's statements were inconsistent with his earlier confession.
The defense moved to exclude these statements on the grounds that they were made in connection with plea negotiations and that the state had promised that the polygraph statement would not be used in evidence. The trial court ruled that the statements could not be used by the state in its case in chief but deferred ruling on whether they might be used in rebuttal.
At trial the state presented evidence that Kathy Tolin disappeared from her job during the early morning hours of March 13, 1979. Her body was later discovered in a wooded area nearby. She had been raped, strangled, stabbed, and mutilated. Either the strangulation or the stabbing could have been the cause of death.
The interrogating officer testified to appellant's confession made soon after his arrest. According to this statement, appellant directly participated in robbing, kidnapping, and raping the victim. He and his accomplice abducted her from the store and took her into some woods. Appellant said, however, that she ran away after being raped, and that Engle ran after her. Fifteen minutes later, according to the confession, Engle returned, dragging the dead body of the victim. Then appellant and Engle placed the body in the trunk of appellant's car and removed it to another wooded area.
A state witness who was well acquainted with both appellant and Engle testified that he was present when appellant and Engle made a plan to rob the convenience store, and that they left him at his home at about 2:00 a.m. on the night of the murder and departed, with robbery as their stated purpose, in appellant's car, with appellant driving. After the murder, the witness testified, appellant remarked to him "We got to get rid of Scott's knife because that's what it was done with." Testimony and Proceedings, vol. V, at 573. This witness also testified that he talked with Engle about the murder and that Engle refused to give up his knife, indicating that he did not believe the knife could be linked to the murder. The witness testified:
I asked him why they did it and he said that they took her out of the store to get her away from a phone. They took her out into the country and Rufus went crazy and started saying she's going to identify us. And I asked him, I said, man, was it worth killing a little gal over a lousy fifty-dollar robbery and he said no, it wasn't.
The testimony of the state's main witnesses was corroborated by several items of physical evidence. Police recovered the knife identified as belonging to Scott Engle and established as having been the murder weapon. A minute amount of blood was found on the knife which could have been the blood of Kathy Tolin but could not have come from Engle or appellant. Blood found in the trunk of appellant's car was also of the victim's blood type. Hairs recovered from the back seat and trunk of appellant's car were probably those of the victim, according to expert testimony.
Appellant argues four points on appeal. He maintains that (1) the court erred in refusing to grant in full his motion to exclude the statements he made to the polygraph examiner; (2) that the court erred in denying his request to conduct an experiment to demonstrate the effects of the level of alcohol intoxication with which he asserts he was afflicted at the time of his arrest and interrogation; (3) that the court erred in refusing to suppress his confession; and (4) that the court erred in sentencing him to death when the jury recommended life imprisonment.
On the first point, appellant argues that the court's ruling, excluding the statement to the polygraph examiner from evidence on the state's case in chief, left open the possibility that the statement could have been used for impeachment or rebuttal purposes in the event appellant had testified in his own defense. Indeed it did leave open such a possibility since the court specifically stated in its order of exclusion that in the event of the defendant's choosing to testify in his own defense, the court would entertain a proffer of the statement for purposes of impeachment. Appellant argues that the statement should have been completely excluded and that the error prejudiced his defense by preventing him from testifying in his own behalf.
Appellant argues that his statement was made in connection with plea negotiations and was therefore inadmissible for any purpose under section 90.410, Florida Statutes (1979) 1 and Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.172(h). 2 The state argues that the trial judge was correct in its ruling. The fact that the statement was excludable from the case in chief, the state argues, should not provide a license for an accused to commit perjury free from the risk of being confronted with prior inconsistent statements, citing Oregon v. Hass, 420 U.S. 714, 95 S.Ct. 1215, 43 L.Ed.2d 570 (1975) and Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222, 91 S.Ct. 643, 28 L.Ed.2d 1 (1971). The state had agreed that the polygraph results would not be used in evidence; however, the state argues that the statement in question is not part of the result of a polygraph examination.
To determine whether a statement is made in connection with plea negotiations, a court should use
a two-tiered analysis and determine, first, whether the accused exhibited an actual subjective expectation to negotiate a plea at the time of the discussion, and, second, whether the accused's expectation was reasonable given the totality of the objective circumstances.
United States v. Robertson, 582 F.2d 1356, 1366 (5th Cir. 1978) (en banc); see also United States v. O'Brien, 618 F.2d 1234 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 858, 101 S.Ct. 157, 66 L.Ed.2d 73 (1980); United States v. Pantohan, 602 F.2d 855 (9th Cir. 1979). Whether a defendant's subjective expectation of negotiating a plea is reasonable depends on whether the state has indicated a willingness to plea-bargain and has in fact solicited the statement in question from the defendant. Unsolicited, unilateral utterances are not statements made in connection with plea negotiations. See Blake v. State, 332 So.2d 676 (Fla. 4th DCA 1976).
We conclude that the statement in question was not made in connection with plea negotiations. Although the polygraph examination was arranged so that appellant's version of the criminal episode could be substantiated and although this was...
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