Case Title: State v. Towne

Citation: 

Docket Number: 

State: vermont

Court: Vermont Supreme Court

Date: 1991-02-01T00:00:00Z

Document:
NOTICE:  This opinion is subject to motions for reargument under V.R.A.P.
 40 as well as formal revision before publication in the Vermont Reports.
 Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Vermont Supreme
 Court, 111 State Street, Montpelier, Vermont 05602 of any errors in order
 that corrections may be made before this opinion goes to press.


                                 No. 89-298



 State of Vermont                             Supreme Court

                                              On Appeal from
      v.                                      District Court of Vermont,
                                              Unit No. 2, Chittenden Circuit

 Edwin A. Towne
                                              February Term, 1991



 Alden T. Bryan, J. (pretrial motions)
 Frank G. Mahady, J. (pretrial motions and trial on the merits)

 William H. Sorrell, Chittenden County State's Attorney, and Rosemary S.
    Hull, Deputy State's Attorney, Burlington, and Gary Kessler, Supervising
    Appellate Prosecutor, and Pamela Hall Johnson, Appellate Prosecutor,
    Montpelier, for plaintiff-appellee

 E.M. Allen, Defender General, and William A. Nelson, Appellate Attorney,
    Montpelier, for defendant-appellant


 PRESENT:  Allen, C.J., Gibson, Dooley, Morse and Johnson, JJ.


      JOHNSON, J.   Defendant appeals from a conviction of first degree
 murder.  He claims that (1) a search warrant issued for his residence was
 not supported by probable cause; (2) his refusal to comply with a
 nontestimonial identification order should have been suppressed because it
 violated V.R.Cr.P. 41.1, Article 11 of the Vermont Constitution, and the
 Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution; (3) a statement he made
 to the police should have been suppressed because it was obtained in
 violation of his rights under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the United
 States Constitution; (4) his arrest was illegal; and (5) the information was
 deficient and improperly amended.  We affirm.
      At about 8:10 a.m on September 10, 1986, Paulette Crickmore was last
 seen alive on the Jericho Road in Richmond, Vermont, on her way to Mt.
 Mansfield Union High School.  By October, police investigations of her
 disappearance had focused on defendant, who lived in the area and was on
 parole after a conviction of sexual assault.  On October 21, 1986, the
 police, in possession of a New Hampshire fugitive warrant and aware that
 defendant possessed a firearm in violation of federal law, arrested
 defendant and questioned him about his whereabouts at the time Crickmore
 disappeared.  Defendant admitted that he was on the Jericho Road the morning
 of September 10 on his way to Eden, where he was constructing the foundation
 to his future home.  The police learned through conversations with
 defendant's employer that defendant had acquired a number of cement blocks
 for his foundation on September 12, 1986.
      The victim's body was recovered in November 1986 in a wooded area off
 the River Road in Duxbury, Vermont.  Upon examining the remains, the police
 medical examiner concluded that she had been murdered by three gunshots to
 the head; the bullets used were recovered from the corpse along with a
 number of unidentified hairs.  The position of the victim's clothes
 suggested she had been raped prior to the murder.
      By mid-November, a Department of Public Safety firearms expert had
 concluded that the bullets recovered from the victim's body were fired from
 a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson long revolver.  In early December, the police
 learned from defendant's girlfriend and her son that defendant had purchased
 a .32 caliber revolver in Rochester, Vermont.  An examination of the records
 from the gun shop where the weapon was purchased revealed that the date of
 purchase was July 27, 1986.  Defendant's employer informed the police that
 defendant sometimes fired live ammunition into the wall at his place of
 business.  On December 5, two bullets were recovered from that wall, and an
 examination of the bullets by a firearms expert revealed that one of the
 bullets recovered was fired from the same gun that fired the bullets
 recovered from the victim's body.
      On December 6, 1986, the police obtained a warrant to search the
 foundation of defendant's house with a metal detector.  A prior search of
 the house by federal agents had yielded several firearms but not the .32
 revolver.  A gun, later determined to be the murder weapon, was recovered
 from one of the cement blocks comprising the foundation.
      Defendant was charged on December 7, 1986.  On December 18, a
 nontestimonial identification order was issued requiring defendant to appear
 at the St. Albans Correctional Center and submit samples of pubic and head
 hair.  Defendant failed to comply even after the trial court ruled that his
 refusal would be sanctioned by allowing it to be introduced at trial as
 evidence of guilt.  In September 1987, the police received an F.B.I. report
 indicating that no hair of value for comparison had been recovered from the
 victim's remains.
        Defendant was tried and convicted in January 1989.  This appeal
 followed.
                            I. The Search Warrant
      Defendant contends that the murder weapon should have been suppressed
 because the search of his house was conducted pursuant to a warrant not
 supported by probable cause.
      The evidence sought in the warrant application was the murder weapon
 and any items that could be identified as belonging to Paulette Crickmore.
 The place to be searched was defendant's house, particularly its foundation.
 Defendant admits that facts in the affidavit supporting the search warrant
 provided probable cause to believe he committed the crime, but, citing State
 v. Brown, 151 Vt. 533, 535 n.2, 562 A.2d 1057, 1058-59 n.2 (1989), he
 argues it was not "more likely than not" that the murder weapon would be
 found in the foundation of his house.
      Preliminarily, the State argues that Brown's "more likely than not"
 standard for probable cause is erroneous and should be overruled.  To the
 extent that Brown requires a rigid quantitative analysis for determining
 probable cause, we agree that it is not the correct standard and now
 overrule that portion of Brown.  Defendant's chief argument -- that in
 murder cases, the most likely probability will always be that the murderer,
 once suspected, will dispose of the weapon -- demonstrates the weakness of
 the Brown rule.  Under Brown, whenever the evidence was most likely
 destroyed or disposed of, the police would not have probable cause to
 search for it anywhere.
      The only support cited for Brown's more-likely-than-not standard is
 two ambiguous statements in Spinelli v. United States,