Court Opinion

ID: 9730456
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:12:56.104955+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:06.633334
License: Public Domain

DeBRULER, Justice,
concurring and dissenting.
In this case, I would affirm the convie-tions, but set aside the penalty of death as *1210inappropriate to appellant and his crime. To so vote is not to excuse or to justify, but to apply the intent of the sentencing law.
The State pleaded and undertook to prove two aggravators warranting the death penalty: 1) intentional killing while committing a burglary, (current version at 1.0.35-50-2-9(b)(1)(B)); and 2) murder by lying in wait, 1.0.85-50-2-9(b)(8).
I can accept the first of these aggrava-tors despite the fact that the specific criminal intent alleged in support of the burglary element of the aggravator is the intent to kill, the same intent alleged in support of the intentional killing element of the aggravator. The crime of burglary involves essentially an interference with the lawful possession and occupation of property. Bradley v. State (1964), 244 Ind. 630, 195 N.E.2d 347. It is separate and distinct in law from the intended felony, should it be committed; and sufficiently separate in time and space to serve as a means for identifying the sub class of intentional killings for which the death penalty may be appropriate. However, where the intent of the burglary is the intent to kill, the weight of the aggravator is greatly diminished, for the mind has formed but a single felonious intent. One who breaks and enters with the intent to steal, who, when upon being confronted by a resident chooses to kill in order to achieve the stealing or to avoid detection by authorities, is more culpable than appellant. Moreover, this would not be a capital case at all, if appellant had first met the victim in the yard and the crime had occurred at that point.
I cannot, however, accept the second of these alleged aggravators in this case. In Thacker v. State (1990), Ind., 556 N.E.2d 1315, 1325, this Court held:
We therefore construe this statutory ag-gravator as intending to identify as deserving consideration for the penalty of death those who engage in conduct constituting watching, waiting and concealment with the intent to kill, and then choosing to participate in the ambush upon arrival of the intended victim.
Here, appellant, with a shotgun in hand, parked his car in a lot down the alley from the house. He walked up the alley, entered the backyard through a gate, went to the back door, broke it in, immediately confronted his ex-wife, and pointed the gun at her. She told her to daughters to run and call the police. They did run to a neighbor's house and immediately called police. She escaped from the house with him in chase, and he then struck her repeatedly, using the gun as a club, killing her. He left the scene, but soon gave himself up. There is no basis here to find a murder by lying in wait.
The trial court found no mitigating circumstances. I find this contrary to the record, fairly viewed. I give mitigating value to appellant's conduct in turning himself in to police. In so doing, appellant removed himself as a threat to the police and to others. This is an appropriate circumstance for consideration. 1.0.85-50-2-9(c)(8). I give mitigating value to the evidence as it shows that Matheney acted under the influence of extreme mental and emotional disturbance at the time of the murder. 1.0.35-50-2-9(c)(2). Appellant, in his relations with neighbors, fellow workers, his children and the children of others was helpful, useful, generous and kind. At the same time he was violent and abusive to his wife, the victim, and spent the entire year of 1986 receiving professional help. In 1986, appellant was professionally diagnosed as suffering from a mental disease, schizophreniform disorder. In 1987 he pleaded guilty to battery of his wife and was committed to prison for that, and for removing his two children to Canada in violation of a custody order. 700 days in prison passed without contact with her, before he killed her in March of 1989, while on leave from prison.
During this time in prison, he was persistently motivated from within to write mail and file a host of documents, pleadings and complaints, the thrust of which were to claim that he was the victim of a conspiracy between his ex-wife, the prose-*1211eutor, and others. His paranoid focus came to rest upon some tapes of telephone conversations in her possession. During the trial for her murder, three psychiatrists testified with respect to appellant's condition in 1989 at the time of the killing. Of the three, one was of the opinion that appellant then suffered from a paranoid disorder constituting a mental disease or de-feet; the others were of the contrary opinion. By the time of the crime, appellant had long been obsessed with the idea that he was being wronged by his wife. When confronting her after breaking in the house, he ignored the two children who were present, even as they left the house to call for help, on instruction from their mother. At that time he prodded her with the gun and, according to one of the children he was "growling." 'The evidence shows that the gun was unloaded when stolen by appellant, and that the owner had no ammunition for it, and that appellant did not discharge it during the crime. Indeed, there is no evidence at all that the gun was loaded at any time during the crime, or even that appellant had any ammunition to fit it.
In reviewing this sentence, I am unable to declare that there is a difference between the weight of the lone aggravating circumstance and that of the several mitigating ones. The extreme penalty is therefore not, in my opinion, appropriate.