Opinion ID: 1349797
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Evidence obtained after May 21, 1979

Text: Against this properly obtained and properly presented evidence, the evidence introduced at trial that Oglesby obtained from petitioner after May 21, 1979, is comparatively less significant and predominantly cumulative. That evidence consisted of (i) testimony that petitioner changed the escape plan to blow up the bus with dynamite in order to dismember all inside it and thereby mask his escape, and (ii) five additional notes in which petitioner refined and revised the plan. [13] It is true, as petitioner stresses, that the prosecutor addressed the evidence obtained by Oglesby during closing argument at the penalty phase trial. Although the majority of the thirty-page argument focused on the violent and callous nature of petitioner's crimes, the prosecutor made one reference to Oglesby and four references to his testimony. First, the prosecutor reminded the jury that Oglesby had testified that petitioner mentioned he liked to rob Orientals, because he thought they would usually have money. Next, he recounted how petitioner wrote a note saying that Blackie, the codefendant who eventually testified against him, was a heartbeat away from death. Then the prosecutor turned to the escape plan: What does the plan show? Not only is the driver of the transportation going to be killed, not only the swamper, the guy in the back of the bus going to be killed; but dynamite is going to be thrown into the bus to disfigure the inmates so that you can't tell who got away. [¶] Could there be any better illustration of the brutality, the cruelty, and the viciousness that is in the system of Stanley Williams than that plan? Finally, the prosecutor returned to the escape plan: And, of course, the escape plan is filled with the planning, rather detailed planning, of violence. And this is long after the defendant has already killed four people and is in County Jail and is still making the same kinds of plans involving the same kinds of violence to benefit only one person in society. That person is Stanley Williams. It is also true, as petitioner observes, that in this argument the prosecutor referred to some of the evidence obtained after May 21, 1979  i.e., petitioner's revised plan to blow up the transport bus with dynamite, and his threat to kill Blackie Coward, whom petitioner suspected of turning against him and cooperating with the police. [14] But, as noted above, this evidence played a relatively minor role in the prosecutor's penalty phase argument, and in any event, the essence of the escape plan evidence, and the fact that defendant made incriminating statements linking himself to the underlying murders, were properly before the jury. The jury was properly informed through various witnesses other than Oglesby that petitioner had made incriminating statements about both the convenience store murder and the motel murders, and it properly learned, through the pre-May 21, 1979, evidence obtained by Oglesby, that petitioner had developed a sophisticated and violent escape plan. Moreover, the jury was properly aware of the map and the initial two notes concerning the escape plan. Given this, and in view of the other aggravating evidence that was properly before the jury  including petitioner's bragging admissions to Coward, James Garrett, and Esther Garrett (as well as to Oglesby), and his laughing portrayal of the sounds the convenience store victim made while dying  we can confidently say that the jury would have returned the same verdict of death in the absence of the evidence obtained after May 21, 1979. In other words, we conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, that assuming the escape plan evidence obtained after May 21, 1979, was procured and presented in violation of petitioner's Sixth Amendment rights under Kuhlmann v. Wilson, supra, 477 U.S. 436, any such error did not affect the jury's penalty decision in this case. (See also post, p. 612, fn. 24.)