Opinion ID: 2785252
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Summations

Text: In his closing argument, Calle argued that the Hill murder had been solved backwards: The police and 27 the District Attorney’s Office had decided at the outset that Rivas was the killer and then set out to find, or fabricate, the proof of the murder from there, ignoring other potential leads along the way. Trial Tr. at 1044. With respect to the time of death, Calle argued that Mitchell had to stretch science beyond the breaking point to opine at trial that it was more likely that Hill had been killed on Friday than on Saturday, when Mitchell had previously testified before the grand jury that a Friday time of death was only ‚on the outside limits of possibility.‛ Id. at 1062. Calle did not explicitly challenge Mitchell’s credibility or suggest that he might be beholden to the District Attorney’s Office. Indeed, Rivas claims that neither he nor Calle were aware of the investigations into Mitchell’s conduct at the time of the trial, despite their widespread publicity in the weeks leading up to it, apparently because they both then lived downstate. See § 2254 Petition at iv; Remand Hearing Tr.[, dated Sept. 21 & 22, 2009,] at 271–72. Fitzpatrick, in his summation, defended Mitchell’s estimates: [A]s [Dr. Mitchell] told the grand jury, rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body after death, normally begins to pass off within 24 to 48 hours. If we were looking at a calendar, this would put the normal time of death or the normal median time of death sometime Saturday afternoon. Could it have been 16, 17, 18 hours earlier? Absolutely. Absolutely. Heating conditions refer, first of all, to 75 degrees. It wasn’t the 28 temperature of the house. The temperature of the house was 62 degrees. . . . Basement underneath her, cold floor. And the nights as you might expect, in March of 1987 were cold as well. Trial Tr. at 1082–83.21 Furthermore, Fitzpatrick argued, Mitchell had ‚had a chance to review autopsy sectional slides of the brain,‛ id., which tended to expand the range of possible times of death. This review, Fitzpatrick claimed, combined with the external indications Mitchell had identified, had led Mitchell to opine that it was most likely that Hill died on Friday, March 27. 21 In fact, the temperature of the apartment was never recorded and Hill was lying on a carpeted floor. The record also reveals that the week of Hill’s death was unusually warm. One witness told police that the last time she had seen Hill, Hill was sunbathing in her backyard. Section 440.10 Mot. Exh. 24. Another witness stated that she had her window open late Saturday night, when she heard a woman’s scream. Id. Exh. 4. Parenthetically, we note that, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the mean temperature in Syracuse, NY, on March 27, 1987, was 51° Fahrenheit, with a high of 61° and a low of 40°. On March 28, the temperature ranged from 37–65° with a mean of 51°. And on Sunday, March 29, the day before Hill’s body was discovered, the high temperature was 74° and the low 36[°] with a mean of 55°. See Local Climatological Data, Monthly Summary for Syracuse, NY, March 1987, available at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/lcd/lcd.html?_finish=0.400803217 488396 (last visited July 3, 2012). 29 Summarizing the evidence against Rivas, Fitzpatrick theorized that Rivas had paid Hill a visit on Friday night after he left Coleman’s bar, and had brought over a bottle of rum and a bottle of wine in hopes that the two could mend their relationship. When he discovered that Hill not only did not want to reunite with him, but was also planning a trip to the Bahamas alone, he flew into a rage and strangled her. Then, realizing he needed to cover up the crime, he got rid of the airline ticket (but left an ashtray full of his cigarettes), and, on the way to his car, took Hill’s library book from the back seat of her car, intending to return it the next day to make it appear as though Hill were still alive. He then crafted a tight alibi for the rest of the weekend. Id. at 1125–30. The jury deliberated for eight hours over the course of one day, during which time it asked for further instructions on the meaning of ‚reasonable doubt.‛ Id. at 1188. At approximately 10:45 p.m. on March 25, 1993, nearly six years to the day after Valerie Hill was killed, Hector Rivas was found guilty of second-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced on May 12, 1993, to an indeterminate term of imprisonment of twenty-five years to life.