Opinion ID: 1127477
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 17

Heading: Patricia Moore

Text: Defendant contends that in questioning Patricia Moore, the prosecutor resorted to extreme persistent leading, putting words into the witness's mouth and pressing her to accept them. Not so. Moore testified at both the first trial and the penalty retrial. At the penalty retrial she testified that on her way home from work at approximately 12:30 a.m. on March 27, 1980, she saw a motorcycle and a man who appeared to be digging in the field where Lingle's body was found. She identified that man as defendant. The record reveals that in addition to the difficulty of testifying to events that occurred nine years earlier, Moore was a fearful and reluctant witness. She conceded at the penalty retrial that she had failed in the first trial to identify defendant as the only person in two different photographic lineups whom she believed to be the person in the field, as well as in-court at the first trial, because of pressure from her husband and fear for her family's safety. While Moore did not make an in-court identification of defendant, she did ultimately testify at the first trial that the person in the field was the same person shown in one of the photographs used in the lineups. That photograph was of defendant. The prosecutor elicited this concession and the motivation underlying it presumably to defuse or prevent defense impeachment with the same information. Such a tactic is clearly permissible on direct examination. ( People v. Hardy (1992) 2 Cal.4th 86, 171 [5 Cal. Rptr.2d 796, 825 P.2d 781].) Contrary to defendant's assertion, the prosecutor did not place special emphasis on facts purportedly known to himself, create, from the whole cloth, an eye witness identification placing Davenport at the crime scene, where none otherwise would have existed, or insinuate that defendant could cause harm to innocent children as long as he lived, even if incarcerated. Nor, as defendant asserts, did the questioning improperly affect defendant's lingering doubt defense, which in any event was focused solely on the torture-murder special circumstance and not defendant's guilt.