Ybanez v. People

• Citation: 413 P.3d 700
• Decision Date: 12 March 2018
• Docket Number: Supreme Court Case No. 14SC190
• Parties: Nathan Gayle YBANEZ, Petitioner, v. The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.
• Court: Supreme Court of Colorado

413 P.3d 700

Nathan Gayle YBANEZ, Petitioner,

v.The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Respondent.

Supreme Court Case No. 14SC190

Supreme Court of Colorado.

March 12, 2018

Attorneys for Petitioner: Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP, Shannon Wells Stevenson, Emily L. Wasserman, Claire E. Mueller, Denver, Colorado

Attorneys for Respondent: Cynthia H. Coffman, Attorney General, John T. Lee, Assistant Attorney General, Denver, Colorado

Attorney for Amicus Curiae Colorado Office of the Child's Representative: Colorado Office of the Child's Representative, Sheri Danz, Deputy Director, Denver, Colorado

Attorneys for Amici Curiae Juvenile Law Center, et al.: Juvenile Law, Center Marsha Levick, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Colorado Juvenile Defender Center, Hannah Seigel Proff, Denver, Colorado

Attorneys for Amici Curiae Legal Ethics Professors: University of Colorado Law School, Melissa Hart, Boulder, Colorado, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Eli Wald, Denver, Colorado

Attorney for Amicus Curiae the Twentieth Judicial District, Office of the District Attorney: Stanley L. Garnett, District Attorney, Boulder, Colorado

En Banc

JUSTICE COATS delivered the Opinion of the Court.

¶ 1 Ybanez petitioned for review of the court of appeals' judgment affirming his conviction of first degree murder and directing that his sentence of life without the possibility of parole be modified only to the extent of permitting the possibility of parole after forty years. See People v. Ybanez, No. 11CA0434, 2014 WL 561995 (Colo. App. Feb. 13, 2014). In an appeal of his conviction and sentence, combined with an appeal of the partial denial of his motion for postconviction relief, the intermediate appellate court rejected Ybanez's assertions that the trial court abused its discretion and violated his constitutional rights by failing to sua sponte appoint a guardian ad litem; that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel both because his counsel's performance was adversely affected by a non-waivable conflict of interest under which that counsel labored and because he was prejudiced by a deficient performance by his counsel; and that he was entitled to an individualized determination regarding the length of his sentence rather than merely the possibility of parole after forty years.

¶ 2 Because Ybanez lacked any constitutional right to a guardian ad litem and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in not appointing one as permitted by statute; because Ybanez failed to demonstrate either an adverse effect resulting from an actual conflict of interest, even if his counsel actually labored under a conflict, or that he was prejudiced by his counsel's performance, even if it actually fell below the required standard of competent representation; and because Ybanez is constitutionally and statutorily entitled only to an individualized determination whether life without the possibility of parole or life with the possibility of parole after forty years is the appropriate sentence, the judgment of the court of appeals is affirmed, and the case is remanded with directions to return it to the trial court for resentencing consistent with the opinion of this court.

I

¶ 3 In 1999, a month before his eighteenth birthday, Nathan Gayle Ybanez was convicted as an adult of first degree murder for the 1998 beating and strangulation death of his mother, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He did not appeal his conviction or sentence, but in 2007 he filed a motion for postconviction relief pursuant to Crim. P. 35(c), challenging the effectiveness of his counsel's representation and the constitutionality of his sentence. That motion was heard in 2009 and partially granted in 2011, only to the extent of reinstating his right to appeal. He then filed an appeal of his conviction and sentence, as well as an appeal of the denial of the remainder of his motion for postconviction relief, which were heard by the court of appeals as a single combined appeal. The court of appeals affirmed the lower courts, and the defendant petitioned this court for a writ of certiorari.

¶ 4 At trial, the prosecution's case was presented largely through the testimony of the officers who apprehended the defendant attempting to dispose of his mother's body and who investigated the scenes of both the arrest and the murder; the pathologist who performed the autopsy; and the testimony of one of the three young men who conspired to clean up the scene, dispose of the body, and cover up the murder, but who had subsequently agreed to testify in exchange for not being charged for his participation. In addition, the prosecution presented the testimony of the defendant's father, who had been with the defendant and his mother earlier in the day of the murder and who had persuaded the mother not to immediately send the defendant to military school; the defendant's girlfriend, whom the defendant called immediately after the murder and who warned the other two conspirators of the police investigation implicating them; and a friend of the victim, who had no first-hand knowledge of the killing. The defendant did not testify on his own behalf or present any witnesses.

¶ 5 The evidence presented at trial was to the effect that on the evening before her murder, the victim packed her car with things the defendant would need at a military school to which she intended to take him the next day. At her request, the father, who had moved out of the family home over tension concerning how to deal with increasingly problematic behavior of the defendant, came to the apartment the next morning, but rather than helping take the defendant to the military school as intended, managed to persuade the victim to agree to give the defendant another chance to change his behavior. That afternoon the defendant worked his job at Einstein's Bagel's, where he told his friend and fellow punk-band member Bret Baker, and had already told their mutual friend and bandleader Eric Jensen, that he was going to kill his mother that night. Baker testified that the defendant had made similar statements before and that he did not take the threat seriously.

¶ 6 Baker recounted that sometime after 9 p.m. he got a page from the defendant and upon calling back, both the defendant and Jensen told him to hurry over to the defendant's apartment. On arrival he was met at the door by Jensen, who appeared scared and had blood on his face, and he saw the defendant, who was blood-soaked and cleaning blood from the carpet. Baker testified that despite his initial resistance, at Jensen's order he helped clean and dispose of bloody items, and he described how the defendant and Jensen took showers and how all three filled eight to twelve trash bags with the bloody items and the victim's clothes, to be disposed of, in hopes of making it appear that she had simply left with the defendant.

¶ 7 Baker and Jensen then left to dispose of the bags in trash dumpsters and returned with a can of gas and shovel to implement Jensen's plan to burn and bury the body. They then helped the defendant bring his mother's body—which was inside a sleeping bag—from the deck where it had been kept during the cleanup, wrap it in a rug, tie it with a cord from a guitar amplifier, and carry it to the trunk of the victim's Lexus. Baker testified that when questioned the defendant indicated to him that he killed his mother to prevent her from hurting him, and after being dissuaded from remaining in Denver with friends, as he had planned, the defendant agreed to leave for Mexico after disposing of the body.

¶ 8 Baker and Jensen then left in Jensen's car, disposed of the remainder of the bloody evidence, and returned to Jensen's house. Baker testified that during that time Jensen told him that he had hit the victim in the head with fireplace tongs three times, specifying that at one point the tongs became stuck, forcing him to pull them out, streaking the ceiling with blood. The two concocted a story to tell the police to the effect that they had come over to the defendant's house earlier in the evening but had left when his mother sent them away, and that they then drove around looking for a party, but failing to find one, went for coffee.

¶ 9 Later that night, the defendant called his girlfriend and asked her to wait-up late and let him into her basement when he showed up. About 4 a.m., he was apprehended by a Douglas County Deputy Sheriff while attempting to dispose of the victim's body at a nearby park. In addition to the victim's body, which was stuffed inside the sleeping bag and wrapped in the rug, with the head covered by a trash bag, a number of other incriminating items were also found inside the mother's Lexus, including the fireplace tongs with her blood on them and the gas can, later identified by surveillance footage as having been purchased by Jensen at a nearby gas station. An autopsy would reveal that the victim had been severely beaten about the head with an object that could have been the fireplace tongs and that although those wounds

may have proved fatal if left untreated, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty she had been killed by asphyxiation, as the result of manual strangulation, which could also have been caused by the fireplace tongs.

¶ 10 The defendant was arrested and taken to jail. Although the jury was not told of it because the defendant's father refused to sign a waiver, the defendant was interrogated that night and confessed to the killing by himself, without implicating Jensen or Baker. The defendant's subsequent motion to have his statement declared involuntary, and therefore barred from use even to impeach him if he testified, was denied. The next evening the defendant called his girlfriend from jail and also told her that he had killed his mother and had planned to go to Mexico. While he did not share any details with her, he did tell her that Jensen was there for the murder and that Baker had come over after and...