Wainwright v. State
| Decision Date | 29 October 1985 |
| Citation | 504 A.2d 1096 |
| Parties | Percy Ewell WAINWRIGHT, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. STATE of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee. . Submitted: |
| Court | Supreme Court of Delaware |
Upon appeal from Superior Court. REVERSED and REMANDED for a New trial.
Nancy Jane Mullen, Asst. Public Defender, Wilmington, for defendant below, appellant.
Gary A. Myers, Deputy Atty. Gen., Dept. of Justice, Georgetown, for plaintiff below, appellee.
Before CHRISTIE, C.J., McNEILLY, HORSEY, MOORE and WALSH, JJ., constituting the Court en banc.
The defendant, Percy Ewell Wainwright, was convicted following a jury trial in Sussex County of first degree felony murder, 11 Del.C. § 636(a)(6), and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony. The State declined, during trial, to seek the death penalty, and the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment without probation or parole on the murder charge with a consecutive fifteen year sentence on the weapons charge. The charges stemmed from his participation in the November 3, 1980, attempted robbery of a Bridgeville liquor store and the killing of a store clerk. A codefendant, David Wayne Dodson, was convicted of the same offenses in a separate trial and sentenced to life imprisonment after a jury declined to impose the death penalty.
Although the defendant assigns a number of errors alleged to have occurred at the trial level, we focus on but one. He argues that certain oral statements were obtained by the police in violation of his Fifth Amendment right to counsel under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1955). Since we conclude that it was plain error to deny suppression of such statements we must reverse and remand for a new trial.
The factual record underlying the admissibility of the disputed statements is drawn from the suppression hearing at which the only witness was Detective Griffith of the Delaware State Police. The defendant did not testify at the suppression hearing.
There were no eyewitnesses to the shooting of the liquor store clerk, and no identifiable fingerprints were recovered from the scene of the crime. However, police investigation led to the arrest of David Dodson on November 11, 1982, for the murder. Dodson told the police that he and the defendant were present at the time the clerk was shot, but that the defendant went into the liquor store to rob it and shot the clerk while Dodson remained outside. Based on Dodson's statement, a fugitive warrant was issued and the defendant was arrested at his residence in Maryland on the same day. Detective Griffith accompanied a Maryland State Police detective when the warrant was executed. The Maryland officer read the defendant his Miranda rights and advised Wainwright about the warrant on file in Delaware for first degree murder but the defendant declined to give a statement to Griffith.
The defendant waived extradition and was brought back to Delaware on November 16, 1982. On the morning of November 16, when Detectives Griffith and Lee of the Delaware State Police went to Anne Arundel County Prison to pick up the defendant and transport him to Delaware, the Delaware detectives did not read the Miranda rights to the defendant. The detectives simply transported the defendant in silence to the Delaware State Police Barracks in Georgetown.
Upon arrival at the Barracks in Georgetown, the defendant was first taken to the Troop Commander's Office where he was advised "why he was brought back to Delaware and what he was being charged with." Detective Griffith read the Miranda rights to the defendant from a card issued to the state police. In response, the defendant stated that he would like to have an attorney present. At that point, Detective Griffith stopped questioning the defendant and took him to the processing room. Detective Griffith testified that before the defendant was taken to the processing room, however, he advised the defendant that he was being charged with "murder one of Mr. William Hastings at Bridgeville, Delaware," and that the reason he was being charged was that codefendant David Wayne Dodson had given a complete statement describing how he and Wainwright had gone to Lord's Package Store where Wainwright shot Hastings. Detective Griffith described the exchange as follows:
Q. And you told him the substance of what David Dodson had said?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What was that?
A. That Mr. Dodson had admitted going to the package store with Mr. Wainwright, but in his statement he had stated that he had been going to stay outside the package store while Mr. Wainwright had gone in, and Mr. Wainwright had been the one that went inside the package store and committed the murder.
Q. So within five or ten minutes after this man said he wanted an attorney, you were telling him what David Dodson had said?
A. I was advising him why he was brought back to Delaware and what he was being charged with.
Q. And you were telling him the substance of the statement that the police got from Dodson?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What was his response to this?
A. There was no response.
After fingerprinting, the defendant was given lunch and placed in a cell. No conversation took place during lunch. At about 1:00 p.m., Detective Griffith took the defendant to the Magistrate Court, located approximately three hundred yards from the police station. Detective Griffith testified that as he pulled up to the Magistrate Court the defendant turned to him and said: "I didn't kill that man, he stabbed me twice." At that point, Griffith advised the defendant that since he had elected to have counsel, the detective could not talk to him about the case. The defendant then asked Griffith if he could retract his request for counsel, and Griffith told the defendant that he would call the "District Attorney" and have a defense attorney present, and then the defendant could tell his story. Griffith next told the defendant that if he had not pulled the trigger and killed the man, he might be held as a material witness.
Detective Griffith unsuccessfully attempted to reach a deputy attorney general but did not attempt to reach a defense attorney. Immediately after talking with the deputy attorney general's secretary, Detective Griffith asked the defendant whether he wanted to make a statement or tell the detective what happened. The defendant then made a statement in which he confessed to driving his pickup truck through Bridgeville on the night of the murder, but maintained that Dodson stabbed him after he refused to stop the truck. The defendant finally stopped the truck, and Dodson got out of the truck with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Wainwright waited and a short time later Dodson returned and told the defendant to "get out of here."
At the suppression hearing, defense counsel did not contest the admissibility of the first statement made by the defendant. Defense counsel conceded that "[c]ertainly the officer cannot be expected to control spontaneous statements." Instead, defense counsel challenged the admissibility of the defendant's second statement as a violation of the defendant's right to counsel under Miranda.
At the suppression hearing the prosecutor, citing Oregon v. Bradshaw, 462 U.S. 1039, 103 S.Ct. 2830, 77 L.Ed.2d 405 (1983) argued that the defendant's statement as he arrived at the Magistrate Court was, itself, initiation of further communication with the police, and the defendant's subsequent statement that "I don't want an attorney now" was a valid waiver of his right to counsel under Miranda, after which he willingly gave a statement. Defense counsel did not effectively rebut this argument, and the trial judge, after a recitation of the facts as he understood them, concluded that:
The only thing that the State has to show is that the defendant was warned of his constitutional rights, that he understood them, and that he waived them. It is clear that he understood them from the fact that he exercised them the first time, and it is further clear that he wanted to waive them by the fact that he asked to waive them.
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In this particular case, it is clear that he understood them and that he exercised them, and according to the testimony of Officer Griffith, he wanted to initiate a further conversation and withdraw the exercise of that right and wanted to make a statement.... I cannot say that giving him lunch, informing him of the evidence, and bringing him to the Justice of the Peace Court was such overbearing tactics by the police that he was not exercising in (sic) free will....
Because defendant's trial counsel conceded that the defendant's first statement was spontaneous, the trial judge focused only on the waiver aspect of the question of admissibility and ruled, in effect, that defendant's desire to waive his previously invoked right to counsel was established by his own words.
As a threshold consideration we must confront the question of whether the scope of our review may extend to claimed error which was not raised at the trial level. Indeed, the State contends that the concession of partial admissibility by defense counsel not only misled the trial court but now requires this Court to rule upon a question not fairly raised on the trial record.
This Court, in the exercise of its appellate authority, will generally decline to review contentions not raised below and not fairly presented to the trial court for decision. Supreme Court Rule 8; Jenkins v. State, Del.Supr., 305 A.2d 610 (1973). On evidentiary issues, the general rule is that evidentiary questions may not be raised for the first time on appeal. Stevenson v. Henning, Del.Supr., 268 A.2d 872 (1970). Thus, failure to object to the admissibility of evidence in the trial court may preclude a party from raising the objection for the first time on appeal. See Young v. State, Del.Supr., 431 A.2d 1252 (1980); Rochester v. Katalan, Del.Supr., 320 A.2d...
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