Court Opinion

ID: 9644059
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:47:37.423508+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:08.209288
License: Public Domain

DOUGLAS, Judge,
dissenting.
Appellant was convicted for the murder of his wife.
The majority reverses this conviction on the grounds that a hearsay statement was improperly admitted. The admission of that statement was harmless error.
Merle Capwell, deputy sheriff of Duchane County, Utah, testified that he executed a search warrant on appellant’s trailer home in Utah. After the search, he went to a neighboring trailer home belonging to Shirley Watson in order to pick up Sellers’ children. Capwell left and returned some time later. It was at this point that Watson stated, “The woman was not shot, she was suffocated.” It is this statement that the majority finds harmful.
The majority reasons that because of the statement the jury concluded that Shirley Watson was “alluding to the manner or means by which appellant caused her death,” and, inferentially, that the source of this knowledge was the appellant. A closer analysis of the evidence leads to a different conclusion.
First, there has been no showing by appellant that the source of that information was through him. Carla Sellers, appellant’s daughter, testified that she learned of her mother’s death on October 8, 1974, from various phone calls to Garland, while the hearsay statement was made on October 9, 1974. Four witnesses for the State testified that the deceased’s body was found with a washcloth taped over her face. The body was found on October 5, 1974. It requires no stretch of the imagination to infer from this chain of events that the authorities first suspected suffocation as the cause of death and that this information was communicated to Shirley Watson through Carla Sellers after learning of the death through her friends in Garland. The statement in no way connects appellant with the homicide.
Further, the cause of death, as testified to by Dr. Ross Zumwalt, a Dallas County medical examiner, was determined to be acute meperidine intoxication or, more simply, an overdose of Demerol. The evidence revealed that Sellers had been prescribed Demerol and that a supply of the drug was present in his house at the time of his wife’s death. The jury could easily have believed that Mrs. Sellers died at her husband’s hands through the forced ingestion of Demerol. In view of the other evidence of appellant’s guilt, the admission of the hearsay statement was not reversible error.
For these reasons, the judgment should be affirmed.