People v. Dozier

236 Cal. App. 2d 94, 45 Cal. Rptr. 770, 1965 Cal. App. LEXIS 806
CourtCalifornia Court of Appeal
DecidedJuly 26, 1965
DocketCrim. 2222
StatusPublished
Cited by24 cases

This text of 236 Cal. App. 2d 94 (People v. Dozier) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering California Court of Appeal primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
People v. Dozier, 236 Cal. App. 2d 94, 45 Cal. Rptr. 770, 1965 Cal. App. LEXIS 806 (Cal. Ct. App. 1965).

Opinion

WHELAN, J.

Defendant appeals from a judgment finding him guilty of robbery in the first degree and of assault with a deadly weapon. In view of the nature of some of the questions involved, it is well to summarize the testimony of several of the witnesses.

George Whitaker testified that between midnight of August 21, 1964, and 2 a.m. of August 22, while walking to the Fleet Landing, he was hailed at the corner of Fourth and Market in San Diego, California, by the defendant, a male dressed in a woman’s long white dress, wearing a fur piece, a black wig and black high-heeled shoes and carrying a woman’s handbag. Defendant was a short distance south of Market Street on the east side of Fourth Avenue. Whitaker went to him and was asked by defendant for a dollar to buy a drink. Whitaker refused and turned to walk away. He was grabbed by his sailor’s neckerchief from behind; he turned around and again was asked for money, the defendant having produced from his purse a metal object which Whitaker thought was a gun. Defendant struck Whitaker and attempted to take his wallet; defendant got Whitaker down on the sidewalk and started hitting him with the metal object and stamping on Whitaker’s head; defendant obtained Whitaker’s wallet and began taking everything out of it; Whitaker managed to get up and ran to the corner of Fourth and Market where he encountered police, to whom he related what had happened. In Whitaker’s wallet, which was not recovered, there had been $22.

Sherman Robert Wiseman testified that while walking north on Fourth Avenue between Island and Market at about 2 a.m. of August 22, 1964, he saw the defendant slap a sailor; that defendant was in a dress and had hold of the sailor by the front of his blouse and said, “Give me a dollar, you son-of-a-biteh, or I’ll kill you.”; he next saw the sailor lying on the sidewalk and the person in the dress was stamping on him; he also saw something glinting in the hand of the person in the dress, which he had also noticed before the sailor went down; he thought the object was a knife; he also saw the person in the dress pulling papers out of something and *97 flipping them; he thought the person in the white dress was a woman; he approached the police, whom he accompanied to the scene of the described events, where the police picked up the papers lying about; that some 10 minutes after seeing the attack on the sailor he saw the person in the white dress alongside a police car on Fifth Avenue between Island and Market and pointed him out to the police as the attacker. Wiseman then saw the person in the white dress inside the same police car and identified that person as the attacker; Wiseman had seen the same person earlier in the evening before the assault and believed the defendant to be that person.

Frank Douglas Price, a sailor, while on the east side of Fourth Avenue and on the north side of Market Street at about 2 a.m. on August 22, saw a commotion on Fourth Avenue, about one-quarter block south of Market Street. He walked toward that point until he reached a spot some 5 or 10 feet from where a person in a woman’s white dress and high-heeled shoes had hold of a sailor by his uniform and had what appeared to be a gun in one hand. He took the person to be a woman and heard this person say, “I’ll shoot ya if you don’t give me some money’’; not wishing to run the risk of gunfire, Price walked back to the corner of Fourth and Market. He observed the defendant (sic) beating the sailor with the gun barrel and saw the sailor go down after awhile. Then the defendant (sic) started stamping on the sailor, all the time demanding money. When there didn’t seem to be any more resistance, the person in the dress reached- down and took a wallet from the sailor and strewed papers all over the street. The person in the dress then walked south on Fourth Avenue to Island Avenue and turned the corner to go east on Island. The sailor ran around the corner of Fourth and Market. There was blood on his uniform. Some 15 minutes later, Price saw the defendant in a police car which was facing north on the east side of Fifth Avenue between Island and Market and identified the defendant seated in the car as the assailant of the sailor.

Terrence Paul Conlin, a San Diego police officer, at about 2:10 a.m. on the morning of August 22, 1964, saw the defendant hobbling in an easterly direction on the north side of Island Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Avenues; one of the defendant’s shoes had the heel missing, which was the cause of the hobbling; the officer, who was accompanied by *98 Officer Davis, learned by radio that there had been a disturbance and met the witness Wiseman in the company of another officer; Conlin, along with Wiseman, went to the scene of the assault where Conlin picked up Whitaker’s identification papers; the officers then proceeded to the Jolly Inn on the east side of Fifth Avenue between Island and Market, where they saw the defendant standing in the doorway; they placed defendant under arrest and searched his handbag, in which they found a right angled drill chuck which had on it what was later identified as human blood; there was also blood on the dress worn by the defendant and on one of his shoes there was blood which was later identified as human blood; at the time of his arrest, the defendant did not have a heel on either shoe; also in the purse were a $5.00 and three $1.00 bank notes.

Officer Conlin testified also, over objection by the defendant, as follows: “Yes, I asked the defendant Dozier if he had contacted the victim, and I pointed toward the victim, at any time earlier in the evening. He said, yes, he had. He mentioned that he had been with this person earlier in the evening, and that the victim, thinking that he was a woman, had made advances. Dozier then told me that he told the victim that he was a boy, and that he should go to the Zebra Club or the 552 Club, which is located in the 500 block of Fifth, if he wanted any activity with a person of the opposite sex. He said that the defendant—or the victim then left. . . .

i 6

“. . . when I made reference to what appeared to me to be blood on Dozier’s face and hands, and on the right-angle drill chuck, and the shoes in the area of the heels, he stated that it had come from the same victim who had bumped into him later when he had met him over in the 400 block—or the block of Fourth.

t i

“I asked him if he had assaulted this individual with the drill chuck, and he said, ‘No.’ ” About 15 minutes had elapsed from the time when Conlin first saw defendant and his later seeing defendant at the door of the Jolly Inn.

Appellant’s testimony in his own defense was to the effect that from time to time during the evening Whitaker had solicited him to go to a room, that there was an issue over a dollar which Whitaker owed for a drink, and that Whitaker had attacked appellant, who merely defended himself. He testified also that Whitaker threatened him with a switch *99

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
236 Cal. App. 2d 94, 45 Cal. Rptr. 770, 1965 Cal. App. LEXIS 806, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-dozier-calctapp-1965.