Opinion ID: 788338
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Lying-In-Wait Special Circumstance

Text: 58 The jury also found the special circumstance of lying in wait to be true. The instructions defined lying in wait as requiring waiting, watching, and concealment, followed by immediate, surprise attack. The instructions further defined concealment as ambush or, alternatively, creation of a situation where the victim is taken unawares even though he sees his murderer. The instructions given to the jury qualified this definition by explaining, it is only concealment which puts the defendant in a position of advantage from which it can be inferred that lying in wait was part of the defendant's plan to take his victim by surprise. A perceptible interruption between the concealment and watchful waiting and the period during which the killing took place would defeat the special circumstance. 59 Under the California statutes at the time of Morales's trial, murder committed by means of lying in wait was, by virtue of that aggravating factor, first-degree murder. 52 Murder that is first-degree, whether for that reason or another, and that was committed in the special circumstance that the killing is while lying in wait, subjects the defendant to a sentence of life without possibility of parole, or death. 53 The by means of factor enhances the murder to first-degree murder, and the while factor allows the first-degree murderer to be death-penalty eligible. Then the jury weighs the while factor, along with many others, to determine whether to impose the death penalty. 54 60 Morales's argument makes no reference to the actual instructions the jury was given or the evidence the jury heard in this case. Nor does Morales claim that the actual jury instructions failed to distinguish meaningfully between lying in wait and mere premeditation and deliberation. Without some connection between the claimed constitutional problems with the lying-in-wait circumstance and what actually occurred in Morales's trial, we cannot say that the Eighth Amendment was violated in this case by the manner in which the special circumstance was applied. Morales instead makes a facial challenge. 61 As for the constitutionality of the special circumstance on its face, a circumstance that makes one eligible for the death penalty must meet two requirements to satisfy the Eighth Amendment: First, the circumstance may not apply to every defendant convicted of a murder; it must apply only to a sub-class of defendants convicted of murder. Second, the aggravating circumstance may not be unconstitutionally vague. 55 Morales appears to be arguing that neither of these requirements is satisfied by the lying-in-wait special circumstance. The dissent accepts Morales's first argument, taking the position that the special circumstance applies to virtually every murderer. 62 We have revised this section of the opinion to respond to the dissent and to appellant's clarification of his argument in his petition for rehearing. Though our opinion as previously published was unanimous, we have all carefully considered the petition for rehearing, and our dissenting colleague has changed her mind on this point. The dissent now takes the position that the confluence of lying-in-wait and other types of murder is virtually complete. 56 63 Under Godfrey v. Georgia, for death-penalty eligibility standards to satisfy the Eighth Amendment's non-vagueness requirement, such eligibility criteria must provide a meaningful basis for distinguishing the few cases in which the penalty is imposed from the many cases in which it is not. 57 This requires the state to provide clear and objective standards that channel the sentencer's discretion, obviating standardless sentencing discretion. 58 If the standards are so vague that they would fail to channel discretion, then they allow arbitrary and capricious sentencing in violation of the Eighth Amendment. 59 The Court in Tuilaepa v. California rejected a broad challenge to the California scheme before us now. 60 In so doing the Court held that the Godfrey requirements are not susceptible of mathematical precision so vagueness review is quite deferential. 61 64 We held in Houston v. Roe that the California lying in wait special circumstance is not unconstitutionally vague as an eligibility factor. 62 Our holding in Houston was premised on the conclusion that California had created a thin but meaningfully distinguishable line between first degree murder lying in wait and special circumstances lying in wait. 63 While Houston was a Fifth-Amendment due-process case rather than an Eighth-Amendment case, it asked and answered the question whether the lying-in-wait circumstance was too vague. Houston thus makes clear that the lying-in-wait circumstance satisfies at least one of the two requirements—avoidance of vagueness— that the Supreme Court has imposed on eligibility determinations. 65 As the Supreme Court made clear in Tuilaepa, 64 however, vagueness is not the only inquiry. We must also ensure that the California regime adequately narrows the class of murderers subject to the death penalty. The remainder of this section addresses that issue, without reliance upon Houston and other Fifth Amendment analysis. The dissent appears to imply that our Eighth Amendment analysis is based on reliance on Houston [ ] for the lying-in-wait special circumstance. 65 Here in the paragraphs below is the separate analysis of the Eighth Amendment issue. We follow Houston for vagueness, as stare decisis requires, but not for the Eighth Amendment narrowing issue. 66 The lying-in-wait circumstance is not overly broad such that it appl[ies] to every defendant convicted of a murder. Such over breadth would render it inadequate under Tuilaepa. 66 Evidently, California regards ambush as an especially immoral way of murdering someone. The lying-in-wait special circumstance codifies that moral sentiment. Our dissenting colleague is quite right that the California Supreme Court has interpreted it liberally, to embrace not just traditional ambush, but murder accomplished by surprising the victim. Where we differ is that the dissent thinks almost all first-degree murders satisfy the California lying-in-wait requirements as so interpreted, and we do not. The three elements of lying in wait, in California law, are (1) a concealment of purpose, (2) a substantial period of watching and waiting for an opportune time to act, and (3) immediately thereafter, a surprise attack on an unsuspecting victim from a position of advantage. 67 The combination of these elements embraces some first-degree murders, but not all. 67 To illustrate a non-lying-in-wait murder: a sadistic person who wants the victim to know what is coming, and who has no doubt of his ability to accomplish the crime, may confront the victim face to face, say I'm going to kill you, and do so. Or a person intending to kill another may threaten the victim, travel armed, and when he spots his intended victim by chance, approach him and shoot him face to face. Or, not uncommonly, the loser of a bar fight may say I'm going to kill you, go to his car or his home and get a gun, come back to the bar, confront the victim saying now I'm going to kill you, and do so. Even under the California Supreme Court's liberal interpretations of lying in wait, these hypothetical first-degree murders would not merit the special circumstance. The dissent says that like a Venn diagram of nearly overlapping circles, the confluence of lying-in-wait and other types of murder is virtually complete. 68 The weasel words here are nearly and virtually. Without them, these common murder scenarios falsify the dissent's proposition. With the words nearly and virtually, it is hard to attribute any meaning to the dissent's proposition, because it apparently cannot be falsified by any empirical demonstration. These common murder scenarios would be cases within what the dissent claims is the empty (nearly empty? virtually empty?) set of first-degree murders not involving lying in wait. 68 Four California Supreme Court decisions similarly illustrate facts placing the cases in the set that our dissenting colleague thinks is the empty set of first-degree murders that do not involve lying in wait. In In re Andrews, a robber killed three victims, one for trying to escape, another apparently for not telling him where the drugs and money he wanted were, and a third apparently for walking in on the crime. 69 There was no lying in wait. In People v. Anderson, the defendant and another murdered a woman because they thought she had molested the daughter of one of the murderers. 70 The victim had already been beaten, stripped naked, and tied up by the defendant and others. When the defendant and his accomplice spotted her after she got herself free and was escaping, they pulled her into their car and killed her. 71 No concealment of purpose, no watching and waiting, no surprise. In People v. Reynoso, two men argued heatedly, and then one shot the other dead, in the chest, with a shotgun at point-blank range. 72 No ambush there, no matter how liberally lying in wait may be construed. In People v. Batts, two gang members, including the defendant, told a younger member to leave the place where the younger member was washing his car, or else something would happen. 73 The younger man refused to leave and, along with his brother, argued with the older gang members. So the defendant and his friend left, returned armed (the defendant had a gun in each hand, the other man made do with one gun), and shot the younger men, killing one of them. 74 No ambush there, just a head-on attack with three guns blazing. 69 To us, it seems unimaginative, or perhaps blind to these and the many cases like them, to suppose that the confluence of lying-in-wait and other types of murder is virtually complete. 75 As we have explained above, to prove the special circumstance of lying in wait under California law, the government must prove first-degree murder plus the three elements of lying in wait: concealment of purpose, watching and waiting, and a surprise attack from a position of advantage. 76 We have described murders committed in ways that would not satisfy one, or even any, of these three requirements. Some murders are accomplished by ambush, some are not, and the special circumstance sorts out which is which. 70 The dissent's position is, in substance, that the California Supreme Court has not really meant what it said when it laid out the three requirements of lying in wait because it has interpreted them so broadly as to eliminate any discrimination between lying-in-wait murders and all other first-degree murders. The dissent says first-degree murders and lying-in-wait murders are like a Venn diagram of nearly overlapping circles 77 —that is, nearly congruent sets, with no cases in the first-degree murder set that are not in the lying-in-wait set. Factually, as the cases described above show, this contention is entirely without force. 71 The dissent's legal argument relies on mistaken use of quotations and citations pulled out of context from some California cases. As described above, lying in wait, under California law, is a term used not only for a death-penalty special circumstance, which is the subject of this case; it is also a term used to describe a substitute for premeditation and deliberation when determining whether a murder is a first-degree murder. That is, entirely apart from how it may affect his penalty, if a person lies in wait to kill another, California treats him as having the equivalent of premeditation and deliberation. 72 While the meanings of the term lying in wait in these two contexts are obviously related, they have been interpreted to mean different things. The California Supreme Court has expressly stated that lying in wait as a special circumstance for the death penalty contains more stringent requirements than lying in wait as an indicator of first-degree murder. 78 Among the distinctions is that lying in wait as a special circumstance, unlike lying in wait as a first-degree factor, requires all three elements mentioned above—concealment of purpose, watching and waiting, and surprise—and lying in wait as a special circumstance requires that the murder be committed while lying in wait. 79 That is, the special circumstance has the requirement that there be no gap in time between the murder and the period of watching and waiting. This is not required for lying in wait as a substitute for premeditation and deliberation. Thus, lying in wait as a special circumstance is more difficult to satisfy than is lying in wait as an aggravator that makes a killing first degree murder. 73 Despite the differences in the term's meaning, the dissent quotes from and relies on several cases about the premeditation and deliberation substitute to make its point about the death-penalty special circumstance. The dissent's citations manifest confusion about the distinction between the two uses of lying in wait. Because the term is used for a different purpose in the cases the dissent cites, those cases are inapposite. What's more, even though the language in some of the dissent's chosen cases is liberal and permissive, the facts in each case show that the defendant in each did in fact engage in a genuine ambush. 74 For example, the dissent quotes from People v. Ruiz to argue that the California Supreme Court has interpreted lying in wait as `the functional equivalent of proof of premeditation, deliberation and intent to kill.' 80 The court in Ruiz, however, was addressing lying in wait as a factor that turns murder into first-degree murder, not lying in wait as a special circumstance for death-penalty eligibility. Lying in wait is, of course, the functional equivalent of first-degree murder when the court is considering lying in wait as a substitute for premeditation and deliberation to raise murder to the first degree. But that does not mean that the death-penalty circumstance, particularly with its requirement that the murder be committed while the killer lies in wait, is the functional equivalent of first-degree murder. The special circumstance is not what the California Supreme Court was talking about in Ruiz. Furthermore, Ruiz involved a defendant who watched and waited until his victims were sleeping and helpless before executing them, which supports a finding of lying in wait under any definition. 81 Thus, neither the functional equivalent statement nor the facts of Ruiz support the dissent's argument. 75 Likewise, People v. Tuthill, upon which the dissent relies to argue that the watching-and-waiting element is meaningless, is also a case about lying in wait as a first-degree factor rather than as a death-penalty special circumstance. 82 And like Ruiz, the facts of that case do not support the suggestion that the term is promiscuously applied to all murders and, therefore, that lying in wait does not mean anything. In Tuthill, the defendant entered the cabin surreptitiously, after [the victim's] repeated refusals to see him alone, took the gun from the wall, loaded it, and lay down on the bed concealing it. 83 76 People v. Hillhouse is the only case whose facts the dissent discusses that really is about lying in wait as a death-penalty special circumstance. The dissent says that Hillhouse establishes that even concealment of purpose is not always necessary, and that under California law criminal defendants meet the concealment test regardless of whether they are hidden or seen, and even whether they conceal their intentions or reveal them. 84 Not so. The victim flashed a hundred-dollar bill in a bar, so when he was drunk, the murderer drove him to a remote location. While the victim was urinating next to the truck, the murderer said, I ought to kill you, and stabbed him to death. 85 The court said that the jury could reasonably conclude that, planning to kill the victim, the murderer waited and watched for the opportune moment to strike, which presented itself when [the victim] was urinating. 86 Though the dissent claims that the statement, I ought to kill you, makes meaningless the requirement of concealment, the court concluded that the remark was virtually simultaneous with the stabbing, and the murderer took him by surprise. 87 77 Not every ambush has to be from the bushes. Our dissenting colleague calls this remark a simplistic syllogism, 88 but it is neither a syllogism nor simplistic. California has broadened the meaning of lying in wait beyond B-movie stage-coach robberies. That does not mean the term has no narrowing meaning. That not every ambush has to be from the bushes, yet murders by ambush differ from murders without ambush, is, in short and plain form, the answer to the narrowing argument. Clarity is not the same thing as oversimplification. Obfuscation can be a shield for murderers.