Murder

This episode features a discussion of a murder in the Spring of 1999.

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Have you ever wondered why the police and other government agencies, for that matter, sometimes don't respond to media requests for information? Have you ever wondered if cops can accept gratuities while they're working? Free coffee or food from restaurants or convenience stores. And have you ever wondered why cops chase some people but not others? Hello and welcome to the Inside the Criminal Process Podcast. My name is Scott, and today I'm going to talk about the crime of murder. But first I wanted to clarify something that I haven't covered in previous episodes. Um, and it's something people get wrong quite a bit and people don't understand. There's a difference between a prison and a jail. Typically, if you run into somebody that's in prison or has been in prison, they were convicted of felonies. Jails are detention facilities more than holding facilities for long term. So you can be sentenced to jail for up to a year on a misdemeanor, but it's but it is different than jail, and the living situation is completely different. So even cops don't get that. Most cops don't understand the difference between jails and prisons, but just know that prison's for a higher level criminal that's been convicted of a felony. So this may sound crazy, but cops have to know the statute that they're enforcing, right? Not word for word, but they have to have they have to know generally what constitutes a crime and where to look to see if the situation they're dealing with is actually a crime. So even even cops with many years of experience have situations that arise where they need some guidance. Um in the departments I work for, we were given statute books for reference. I'm sure it's all computerized now, but we use those a ton. So state legislative statutes are the primary source of criminal laws in this country. And most states' criminal laws have been developed from the Model Penal Code, which was drafted in 1962 by members of the American Law Institute. And the goal was to help states draft fair and consistent criminal laws so that we had some consistency and similarity between states throughout the country. So there's there's two substantive limitations placed on state and federal legislatures regarding creating laws. They cannot create state legislatures, uh, and federal legislatures cannot create ex post facto laws. And what that is, um, it's a law that retroactively criminalizes actions or increases punishments or alters legal procedures to the disadvantage of someone after the act was committed. So when the person committed an act, it wasn't illegal, and then the legislature turns around and makes it illegal and punishes that person for it. Um obviously the goal here is for citizens to have notice of what conduct is considered criminal. And the second limitation placed on legislatures is that no bills of attainder can be made. A bill of attainder is a legislative act that inflicts punishment or denies a privilege without a judicial trial. Okay. So let's talk about homicide. There's three types of homicide. Homicide and murder. Umicide murder is within the homicide category. Okay. So homicide, three types. Justifiable, which is authorized by law if a state has a death penalty. Um excusable, there's a defense to the criminal liability, uh, like uh self-defense is a common one, and then there's criminal homicide. So historically, criminal homicides have been divided into three categories: murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. So murder is actually just the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. That's what the that's what the model penal code's definition of murder was. So you can have you somebody can kill somebody, and it's not a murder, and we're going to talk about this after after I discuss this case that I'm going to tell you about. So, in order to have a criminal offense, you have to have an act, a physical act or omission. You have to have the intent at the time of the act, and there has to be a concurrence. There has to be the physical act and the mental state had to exist at the same time, and there had to be a harmful result and causation. Uh basically, a harmful result was caused by the defendant's act. Okay, so let's get into the case that I was going to discuss. It was the middle of the night, obviously, things happen in the middle of the night, the early morning. Um I get a call. I was really new to the Detective Bureau, and um there's a call that a man was lying dead in an alley behind a motel. Um, and I would we called this motel like a sleazy motel. Uh it was just, it was, it was not clean. People lived there long term, but it was just uh the owner didn't really take care of it. There was a high crime area, a lot of drugs, a lot of assaults, sex assaults, stuff of that nature. But there was a man lying dead in the alley behind this motel. So by the time I got there, and and typically at the agency I worked for, um, they'd call out several detectives so that we could help each other out and and everybody could take a chunk of the case and and work it. But we had one of the detectives was responding to the police station because the girlfriend of the man that was that had been lying dead in the alley was covered with blood. She was hysterical, nobody could get her to say anything. She was just she was screaming and crying and just completely, completely hysterical. So they took her to the station and one of the detectives was responding there to interview her, maybe two, I'm not sure. And the ambulance had taken the man that was lying in the alley, um, so he wasn't still at the scene. The ambulance had reported that, well, that the the initial cops that arrived said that he had been stabbed in the chest. The man had been stabbed in the chest, um, and nobody really knew what was going on. So we knew the we knew the room that he had come from, and we knew that his girlfriend was covered with blood, and and obviously that something had taken place that that he had been stabbed and died. So there weren't any witnesses. Uh nobody was stepping forward to say that they had seen anything, so we started doing a a canvas, and uh an area canvas is just a systematic investigation method that law enforcement uh where they interview people in the specific geographic area to gather information, identify witnesses, and develop leads related to the crime. So we're looking for people that heard something or saw something, just anything at this point, because we we have no idea what's going on. We're standing out there in front of the the office to the motel, and I notice a man that's on the his room is at the very end of the motel, right at the entrance, and he's looking over at us, and he kind of signals for me to come over. So I walked, he waved me over there, I went over there, and I went into his room, and he told me that he had heard a commotion, he heard some screaming, um, which wasn't uncommon in this area, but then there was a banging at it at his door. He opened the door, and a teenage female who sometimes stayed at the motel with her mother and her mother's boyfriend asked if she could use his phone. Uh this was in the 90s, so cell phones weren't that common. Um and she had used his landline before, so she was comfortable going in and asking if she could use it. The man said she called someone and told him she needed help and that they needed to come and get her. She said uh she would be at a strip mall across the street from the motel. So he said as she was in there, the police had started showing up, the fire department was showing up, the ambulance was there, um, and his door faced the entrance to the parking lot. So she crawled out his kitchen window and took off running towards the strip mall. Uh he said she was really shook up and had what appeared to be a bloodstain on her shirt in her hand. So meanwhile, the detective wasn't really having a whole lot of luck with the girlfriend. Um, I asked him to get the girlfriend's daughter's name because I'm thinking, you know, I think this is this is who came into his room. Um so we get the daughter's name. I run it in the computer, and luckily, previously in this city, an officer had contacted her as a suspicious person somewhere in the area of this motel, and he and she had listed an address in a neighboring jurisdiction that she had provided. Um that's where she said that she lived. She sometimes stayed at the motel but she lived at this at this address. She was a 15-year-old and and a member of one of the largest gangs in the city. Um, and I think she might have had a misdemeanor misdemeanor warrant for her arrest. I can't remember though. So we started looking into it. I think the mom eventually said that that she had seen them in the kitchen, uh, the her daughter and her boyfriend in the kitchen of the room, the little kitchenette area, and and they had kind of been arguing, and the boyfriend turned around and ran outside and and fell over dead. So I think we had we had enough to get an arrest warrant for her. Um based on that. I'm not sure if the physical evidence had been processed at that point or not. But we had we had a special team at the police department that I worked on that would focus on problems within the city like gang activity, uh increased burglaries, robberies, thefts in certain areas, etc. And that team began doing surveillance on the house the girl had listed as her residence. She was eventually seen coming out of the house, getting in a car. They pulled that car over, and then uh she was arrested on. It was either the misdemeanor warrant or the the warrant for the murder. I'm pretty sure it was the warrant for the for the murder at the time. So um the day after she was arrested, she was placed in a juvenile facility in the city. Another detective and I went and talked to the mom, who was now staying at a at a hotel that the the victim service funds were paying for. She agreed that we could go interview her daughter at the juvenile detention facility, and and we went and talked to her. She was a tiny girl, real small, petite. Um she seemed real shy. Uh, but she did have several homemade tattoos. You know, the kind where you wrap the thread around the end of a needle and dip it in ink and and poke it into your skin several times. Um, I think in the web of her hand and maybe on the on the forearm of one arm. Uh the girl told us that she had been arguing with her mother boy mother's boyfriend, and she described him as a bully. He was a big dude. He I think he was he was like six foot two, probably 320, 330 pounds. Um and uh she said that he got pissed and was walking towards her, and he backed her against the kitchen counter in the room. Uh said she reached behind her, grabbed a steak knife that was on the counter, and was trying to back him off, and she she thrust the knife into his chest. Uh she said it was she was very surprised at how easily the knife went up to the hilt into his chest, and she actually used the term, it went into his chest like a hot knife into butter. Um no emotion though. She wasn't, she she didn't seem to be remorseful. Uh she wasn't emotional when she was telling us the story. But she said as soon as she did that, the man turned like instantly gray and had a shocked look on his face. Uh she said he clutched his chest and turned and walked out of the motel. She said that she took off, used another resident's phone, and then had her boyfriend pick her up and take her to the house that she stayed at in the neighboring jurisdiction. Um she was street savvy. She didn't have a reason for killing the mom's boyfriend, other than that she didn't like him and wasn't going to let him push her around. By the time her lawyers got a hold of her and they had prepped her, uh, she started painting the man as extremely violent and abusive, and that she she basically feared for his life because he was very violent and abusive. Um I think she also made some allegations that he may have sexually assaulted her on several occasions, uh, but but she did say that she feared for her life the night that she stabbed him. So given the size difference between the man and the girl, uh uh and the fact that she I don't like this term, but she cleaned up nicely. She looked like just this innocent little um petite young girl. Uh the DA's office let her plead to a lower charge uh as long as she was going to complete the it's called the youthful offender system in the state that I worked in. And that program runs in stages, and if a juvenile can complete all of the requirements of the program, they're allowed to avoid adult charges, and the crimes will eventually be removed from the record or it will just stay on the juvenile record. But these stages are pretty intense. Uh a good portion of the student of the kids don't even make it through, and there's a there's a pretty long period of post-incarceration supervision that they have to complete. So um that's what they allowed her to to plead to. Interestingly enough, uh several years later, um I was at the women's prison and I met her daughter there. They had a they had a really unique name. Uh the daughter was serving a sentence for, I think, drug possession, possession. And um I asked her, I said, do you know this person? She said, Yeah, this that's that's my mother. And I said, you know, I was the cop that dealt with her, the detective on the case where she killed your grandmother's boyfriend. She said, Yeah, yeah. She said, We we know we knew about that. And um she told me that her mom had completed her sentence, got married, uh, moved to California, never returned to prison. So uh thought that was interesting because it's a small world, but it it's a good ending as far as I'm concerned, especially if the stuff about the man abusing her was true. You you just don't know. So when we were looking at that, we were looking at several uh different possibilities to charge her with. First degree murder in the state basically says after deliberation and with the intent to cause the death of a person other than himself, a person causes the death of that person or another person. So you could you could be trying to kill John and you kill Bob instead. That's still going to be first degree murder if you deliberated and had the intent to cause the death. So there's other parts of the first degree murder statute, but she didn't do it with aft, she didn't do it with intent after deliberation. Um it was it was it was not something she had planned, or at least that we could prove that she had planned. So that's that was part of the statute that would have would have fit had she done that. The the other parts of first-degree murder are just they're kind of interesting. There's one that says if you if you commit perjury or subordination of perjury, perjury is just providing false testimony under oath in a legal proceeding. If you if you commit perjury or subordination of perjury, which is inducing or allowing another person to lie under oath, and you get the conviction of and execution of an innocent person, that's first degree murder as well. Uh also selling drugs to a minor under 18 on school grounds, and the minor dies a result of using drugs, that's first degree murder in the state as well. Uh also being in a position of trust, knowingly causing the death of a child under 12, that's first degree murder. And then one that's not so clear, it says under circumstances evidencing an attitude of universal malice, manifesting an extreme indifference to the value of human life, generally, knowingly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to a person or persons other than himself, and thereby causing the death of another. So the Supreme Court in Colorado has defined the term universal malice as conduct evidencing a willingness to take human life indiscriminately without knowing or caring who the victim may be or without having an understandable motive or provocation. They've gone further into saying that universal malice describes conduct that objectively demonstrates a willingness to take a life indiscriminately. So they've kind of clarified the whole universal malice thing. And interestingly enough, under first degree murder in this state, uh spousal privilege and doctor-patient privilege is not available to exclude or refuse testimony in any prosecution for a murder in the first degree. So then we look at second-degree murder, basically knowingly causing the death of a person. So it's only knowingly. You don't have to have the intent, you don't have to have premeditation, you just have to knowingly cause the death of another person. So another section of second-degree murder is the felony murder doctrine, which is if you're committing a felony and somebody dies, if you're committing or attempting to commit a felony, or if you're in immediate flight therefrom, uh the death of a person other than one of the participants that is caused by a participant is listed as second-degree murder. So, and there's there's several enumerated felonies. They tell you exact which felt exactly which felonies you would have to be committing when somebody dies to be charged with felony murder. We had a famous one where a girl and her boyfriend were fleeing from another jurisdiction. They had been committing bur burglaries. Um they went into another jurisdiction, that they stopped in that jurisdiction, got into a shootout. One of the cops involved in that chase from the other jurisdiction died. And so the I think the boyfriend was killed, and then the girlfriend was charged with felony murder. Uh heat of passion is a defense to second-degree murder. So anything a heat of passion is caused by a serious and highly provoking act of the intended victim, affecting the defendant sufficiently to excite an irresistible passion in a reasonable person. So they specifically say that heat of passion does not apply if the act results solely from the discovery of knowledge about or potential disclosure of the victim's actual or perceived gender, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation, including but not limited to under circumstances in which the victim made an unwanted, non-forcible romantic or sexual advance towards the defendant. So that's taking somebody picks up what they think to be a female at a bar, takes her home, or thinks to be a male, and the person undresses and it's it's a person of a of the opposite gender, and it it uh makes this person irate and they kill them. They can't use heat of passion defense. I think it it just affects the level of of felony that the person is charged with. So after second-degree murder, there's manslaughter that's basically recklessly causing the death of another. Um, or if you intentionally cause or aid another person to commit suicide. It doesn't apply to DNR orders, do not resuscitate, or power of attorney decision, or medical caregiver prescribing or administering medication for palliative care regarding a terminally ill patient that consents, or whose agent consents to the administration of that medication. Then there's the only other two things under the homicide statute are criminally negligent homicide. That's causing the death of another by conduct amounting to criminal negligence. Um says the defendant must fail to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a certain Result will occur, and the risk must be of such a nature that the defendant's failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from a reasonable person's standard of care. So it's basically doing something that you should have foreseen could result in the death of another person. And the last part of the of the homicide statute is vehicular homicide. That's recklessly recklessly operating a motor vehicle and causing the death of another. Or being driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol or a combination and approximately causing the death of another. That's a strict liability crime. It doesn't matter if the person that's killed in that incident is at fault. So I know of two cases. One where a guy had gone to a football game, was driving home on the highway, he had been drinking, he was in the fast lane, he's driving down the highway. Somebody jumps up over the median into his fast lane, and he doesn't have time to stop and he hits and kills the person. And he was intoxicated. So he got charged with vehicular homicide. The other one was the guy had stopped, went home, or was was on his way home from work, stopped at his buddies, had a couple beers. This guy's driving down the road. A bus stops to let somebody off. The young girl jumps out of the bus, goes running in front of the bus, and the bus driver sees the car coming up behind him, and he's honking at the girl, trying to get her attention, and she runs out from in front of the bus, and this guy hits her and kills her. So in both those situations, the pedestrians that were running in front of the person were at fault. But since the drivers were drunk, they were both charged with uh vehicular homicide. So that's something to consider if you drive drunk all the time and you think, oh, that's okay, I'm a pretty good driver even when I'm drunk. Doesn't matter. Like if you're driving and somebody runs a red light and you run into them and you would go in the speed limit, you were driving with due care. Uh if you were drunk or driving recklessly, in the state you could be charged with vehicular homicide. So they also state that first-degree murder of a police officer, firefighter, or emergency services provider. Um basically, if somebody's convicted of that, they will never get out of prison. So answers to the questions I asked initially. Umy times the police or government agencies have no comment, responses to media requests. Uh it's it's to keep certain aspects of the crime under wraps, if you will, in hopes to catch the culprit. Uh you don't want every detail about an investigation getting out because if too many people know about it, um, then you may not be able to weed some people out. Other times, cases involving sex crimes or crimes against children, there's privacy issues. So the police can't make a statement. The media often pretends that no comment responses are due to incompetence or avoidance for whatever reason. Um but many times the police are gathering information in their investigation. They may even have a suspect, they know they they know what's going on, um, and they just don't want to, they just don't want to compromise the investigation by letting everybody know about it. Gratuities, some agencies allow, some don't. Um the one agency I worked at had a strict policy against accepting gratuities, and there's a famous convenience store throughout the country that refuses to take money from cops when they get a cup of coffee. Uh, we either had to avoid that or we had to leave the money on the on the counter when we bought a cup of coffee there. And then I mean, I don't know what the clerk did with it. They probably put it in those little donation containers. Um, but they just don't want most departments, don't want that appearance of impropriety. So you get a small mom and pop store who can't really afford to give out free coffee or food to cops all the time, and it's gonna, it just may look bad, you know, if the cops are always hanging out by the convenience store and and it just looks like the cops are spending more time and more more attention there than at the mom and pop store. So, chase or not to chase, that was the other question. It depends on the cases uh regarding the police given chase. Um if if a cop is driving down the street and somebody looks at him and takes off running, that's usually not enough for the cop to chase them. They have to have some type of reason, usually reasonable suspicion that this person is committing, about to commit, or has committed a crime. Just running usually doesn't cut it. Um, but it depends on the area, it depends on what's going on, it depends on the uh if the person matches the description of somebody, it depends on a whole lot of different things. Um and the courts look at the totality of the circumstances when they're they're trying to decide whether or not it was it was reasonable for that cop to stop that person. So we had a policy at one of the agencies I worked at that guided foot chases as well. And it's um it was basically the chief was was sick of people being ambushed when they were in a foot chase with somebody. You know, a guy goes around the corner of a building and then stops and waits for the cop and then assaults them when they get there. So it had to be a certain level of crime. Um we were pretty good at setting up perimeters so that so that there were plenty of cops there, and you weren't typically chasing somebody all by yourself. Uh and when the helicopter was available, it was nice because they could get in the area quickly, light it all up, and uh, and the person rarely got away in those cases. So I didn't I didn't mind that foot chase policy. Uh it was there to protect the cops and and car chase policies as well. That's there to protect the the citizens and the other the other drivers on the road. So I don't I don't have a problem with those at all. A lot of cops think it's taking taking your ability to do your job away from you, but I'm good with those policies. So that's it for today's podcast. The next podcast, I am going to talk about an assault case that I had, an assault with weapons case that I had, and um hopefully that'll be posted within the week. So thanks for listening and take care.