Court Opinion

ID: 9466121
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:06:05.431232+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:33.167456
License: Public Domain

COLEMAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Statistics recently released by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare show that 0.6% of the deaths in the United States in 1940 resulted from murder. By 1968 the rate stood at 0.7%, an increase of only 0.1% in twenty eight years. In 1978 the rate stood at 1.1%, an increase of more than 50% in a decade. In what is assumed to be a more enlightened time, in a better educated populace, a citizen has nearly twice the chance of having his life stolen by murder than he had nearly forty years ago. According to the Associated Press Report 143 persons were murdered in Atlanta in 1978 and there have been 195 up to October 20 in 1979.
While individuals may differ as to the cause of this intolerable increase in the incidence of murder, the most reprehensible of crimes, the difficulties encountered in securing a conviction and preserving it against collateral attack in the federal courts is bound to be a part of the picture. The Constitution must be observed but it contains no mandate that it be stretched for the relief of clearly guilty criminals. The federal courts have gone from “per se” to “per se” to such an extent that those who have no respect for either the law or the Constitution are encouraged to believe that the state courts are now impotent to deal out punishment for crime.
The Supreme Court struck a blow at this turn of events when it recognized the harmless error rule in Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967).
In the present case, the Magistrate recommended as follows:
The Magistrate has made a careful detailed study of Harris’ state trial transcript, including all of the testimony against him, and his own testimony on direct and cross-examination. Upon this, *645it is concluded that the error Harris complains of was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt and contributed nothing to his conviction.
The District Court disagreed and invalidated the conviction, which prompted this appeal by the State. Based on my appraisal of the record, I agree with the Magistrate.
The majority, for whom I have the greatest possible deference and esteem, predicates affirmance on language lifted from Madison v. State, 55 Ala.App. 634, 318 So.2d 329, 336 (1975). Respectfully, I must point out that Madison was expressly decided on its own particular facts and it involved quite a different controlling issue of law. Moreover, in the language quoted by the majority the Alabama Court stated that the improper statements of prosecutors are reversible “where their impact upon the jury would be prejudicial” or “where its natural tendency is to influence the finding of the jury”. Additionally, the statements in Madison were objected to, whereas in the instant case no objection was made.
I would hold that the statements in Harris’ case, unobjected to, were neither prejudicial nor did they have a tendency to influence the finding of the jury.
The facts of the present case were set forth by the Alabama Court of Appeals, as follows:
The shooting occurred on may 26, 1976, on the front porch of the appellant’s house located in the Mobile Heights section of the City of Montgomery.
While the appellant has raised the question of the sufficiency of the evidence, there is no need to recite, in minute detail, the testimony presented by each witness.
On the evening of the shooting, Mrs. Valerie Sawyer and Aaron Washington, the brother of the soon to be deceased Harold Wayne Washington, were sitting in Aaron’s car listening to music. They were parked in front of the appellant’s house. The deceased was next door talking to Mr. T. C. Thomas and his son.
Mrs. Sawyer, who was separated, was “going with” Joel Welch who was the appellant’s half-brother. On one or two occasions prior to this night, Mrs. Sawyer had contacted the appellant about getting a message to Joel that she wanted to see him. Joel was married but he and his wife were “getting along bad”. On this particular night, Mrs. Sawyer asked Aaron Washington to go get the appellant. Mrs. Sawyer wanted to see the appellant and not Joel. However, Aaron did not go.
Aaron’s brother, the deceased, walked over to Aaron’s car and Aaron asked him to go get the appellant for Mrs. Sawyer.
The appellant, his wife, his aunt, and his children were preparing for supper when the appellant heard a “loud”, an “abrupt” knocking on his front door. When he opened the door, the deceased told him that “there is a girl wants to see you out here”. The appellant told the deceased that he didn’t want “nothing to do with all that, ... I have got my wife and family here and I ain’t got time for none of that. . . .” The appellant then told the deceased to get off his porch but Harold Wayne did not leave. The appellant testified that the deceased then said, “Nigger, shoot me,” and he “kept going into his pants” where the appellant saw a black handle which he thought was a pistol. The appellant further testified that Harold Wayne kept “bubbling up and everything” and his eyes were “rolling and wandering”. The appellant “didn’t understand where he was coming from” and the deceased kept repeating “Nigger, shoot me”, and would not leave.
The appellant went to the closet and got his .22 caliber pistol. When the deceased again put “his hand into his pants”, the appellant “shot out like that and shut the door” behind him allegedly to keep the deceased from shooting into the house and hitting his wife or one of his children. The appellant testified that he did not intend to shoot the deceased, but fired just to scare him away and to keep him from shooting into the house. The deceased cried out that he had been shot, ran into the street, fell and died.
*646After firing one shot, the appellant testified that he called the police. “A lot of people” gathered outside and when the appellant heard them talking about “getting the gun”, he turned the lights off in the house. Next, according to the appellant, Aaron Washington pulled up near his house and fired a shot which came through the kitchen window and lodged in the kitchen wall. The appellant responded by firing once out the living room window.
When the police arrived on the scene, they found a large crowd gathered three or four houses down from the scene of the shooting. The deceased was lying in the street. On order, the appellant emerged from his house. He was immediately handcuffed and placed in a patrol car. Before the patrol car left for the police station, the appellant was advised of his constitutional rights which were read to him from a standard Miranda rights form.
On the way to the station, no one interviewed or interrogated the appellant. En route the appellant voluntarily stated that the deceased “had threatened him and he had wanted to shoot to warn him to get him away from the door and that he had not intended to shoot the man; that if he had shot somebody, he did not intend to shoot him”. The appellant, according to Montgomery City Police Officer Frank H. Eckerman, further volunteered the information that he was interested in getting rid of some of the drug addicts in the neighborhood. The appellant denied making this last statement and stated that he did tell Officer Eckerman that something was wrong with the eyes of the deceased.
Captain I. B. Moore, a detective for the Montgomery Police Department, found a .22 caliber pistol in the living room of the appellant’s house. Captain Moore turned the pistol, along with four live rounds and two spent hulls, over to Detective Cody Wood. Detective Wood also examined the inside of the appellant’s house and observed “a hole in the wall in the kitchen that appeared to be made by a bullet”.
At the police station later that evening, Detective Wood interrogated the appellant after advising him of his constitutional rights. At that time the appellant freely and voluntarily gave a signed statement which was properly admitted into evidence by the trial judge.
The substance of that statement was that the appellant was sitting in the living room of his home when Wayne Washington knocked on the front door and told the appellant that Valerie Sawyer wanted to see him. The appellant told Washington to “go on with that. Get off my porch . . ., my wife is here and my children and I don’t want nothing like that.” Washington then said, “Nigger, shoot me”, and reached into his pants or under his shirt. The appellant then stated that he:
“ . . . stepped back and got my pistol from the closet and went back to the door. He reached again in his pants and said again, go on, Nigger and shoot me. I shot out the door once and quickly closed the wood door. I just wanted to scare him. I didn’t even mean to hit him.”
The appellant then stated that he turned out all the lights and looked out the front window. He saw Aaron Washington with a gun and shot one more time “in the ceiling or somewhere”, “to scare them and let them know not to shoot in the house . . The appellant, in his
statement said that he shot the deceased because he “thought he had a pistol when he said Nigger, shoot me, and reached in his pants”. The appellant did not want to kill him and just “wanted to scare him or wound him”. Further the appellant stated that his half-brother, Joel, had told him that Mrs. Sawyer liked him and wanted to go with him. The appellant felt like the Washington brothers were trying to tear up his home.
A state toxicologist, Dr. Richard Roper, performed a post-mortem examination upon the deceased. It was his opinion that death resulted from hemorrhage and *647shock associated with a single gunshot wound from a .22 caliber long rifle bullet which lodged in the upper portion of the deceased’s chest. Dr. Roper did not undertake to determine what type of weapon (pistol or rifle) had fired the fatal bullet recovered from the deceased’s body but stated that it could have been a .22 caliber pistol.
I look first to the nature of the trial which spawned Madison:
The trial was peppered throughout with heated arguments between counsel; with admonitions from the trial judge to both counsels; by threats to hold counsel in contempt; and by an offer from an assistant district attorney to defense counsel to settle their argument outside with fisticuffs. Such was the atmosphere throughout much of the trial. Counsel for appellant made repeated objections on grounds that remarks of the prosecutors were improper, one such remark being made outside the hearing of the court reporter, but supposedly within the hearing of the jury. In essence, appellant contends that while the trial court sustained many of his objections and instructed the jury not to consider some of the statements made, nevertheless, remarks were made in the presence of the jury which were not capable of being eradicated from their minds.
This Court must, therefore, carefully review the conduct complained of in light of the authorities cited by both the appellant and appellee, balancing the presumptions in favor of the correctness of the verdict against the effect such conduct would have on appellant’s receiving a fair trial.
To cap all this, as if that were not enough, the prosecutor as a part of his evidence in chief tried to use the testimony of a State Investigator, and his notes to boot, as to what he had been told by two children, ages four and five, about how the Madison homicide occurred. The trial court rejected this testimony out of hand because children of this age were incompetent to testify even if they had been in court, let alone hearsay.
Nevertheless, when the defendant took the stand in his own behalf the prosecutor attempted to use those very statements as a basis for cross-examination. An objection was promptly sustained and the jury was specifically instructed to disregard the questions.
The conviction was reversed:
We find this statement to go beyond all bounds of legitimate cross examinations, under the circumstances of this case. The District Attorney in his zeal to contradict the appellant’s testimony, in effect himself testified as to the statement of appellant’s son which had previously been denied admission into evidence. As previously discussed, any inference that a quarrel had taken place between appellant and his wife, or that he had threatened her in any way prior to the shooting, would be most critical to a jury in reaching a verdict of second degree murder as opposed to manslaughter. We, therefore, are of the opinion that under these particular circumstances, even the prompt and conscientious instructions of the trial court to the jury would be insufficient to eradicate the prejudicial effect of the statement from the minds of the jury. See Renfroe v. State, 49 Ala.App. 713, 275 So.2d 692.
It must further be observed that in Madison, the victim was the defendant’s little daughter. Both he and his wife, who was seriously wounded at the same time, testified, without live contradiction, that the shooting was accidental.
What we have before us at this time is simply not a Madison case.
To begin with, there is not the slightest doubt that our habeas corpus appellee, Harris, deliberately shot in the deceased’s direction, with such success that he killed him dead on the spot. Deliberation was the issue in Madison but legal excuse or justification was Harris’ defense.
It made no difference whether Tracy, the ten year old son, was eating dinner or in the living room. What Tracy might have said *648about two shots being fired was of no importance because the defendant admitted that he did fire two shots, “one out the door and one over Aaron’s head”.
What Tracy might have said about the deceased getting ready to leave the door when he was shot, and being told that if he did not leave the defendant was going to get his gun and start blowing, made no difference, either. The defendant did go get his pistol. The deceased was shot in the upper chest, not in the back or side as would have happened if he were in the act of leaving. Moreover, the shot had to have been fired at or near level to have taken effect in the chest instead of flying harmlessly over the visitor’s head.
Of course, defense counsel knew that the prosecutor had not called Tracy to the stand during the presentation in chief. It was extremely unlikely that he would have been left off if he was willing to testify to anything of value to the State. If defense counsel had objected and the objection had been sustained, as surely it must have been, that would end the matter. By not objecting, this left the matter alive and allowed the opportunity in closing argument to tear the prosecution to shreds for talking about what Tracy said and then not producing him in rebuttal — a trick so unfair that it would have had a powerfully negative effect on the jury. We do not have the oral arguments before us and we do not know what happened but it does not take all that much experience in the trial of homicide cases to know what well could have happened. At least, it cannot be said per se that defense counsel did not know what he was doing when he left the matter available for further exploitation.
To sum up, the defendant had deliberately fired in the direction of the unarmed deceased and killed him at a time when he was on a peaceful, although unwise, mission. The defense had to be that Harris acted in lawful defense of himself or others then and there present. On this subject, the undisputed physical facts spoke for themselves. The questions, unobjected to, should not be allowed collaterally to upset this conviction.
Madison was decided on its own facts, far different from those we have here, and fundamentally on a different legal issue.
I would not upset this conviction on the ground that the killer’s federally guaranteed constitutional rights have been violated to his prejudice.
I respectfully dissent.