People v. Garcia

138 Cal. App. 3d 976, 188 Cal. Rptr. 353, 1983 Cal. App. LEXIS 1303
CourtCalifornia Court of Appeal
DecidedJanuary 6, 1983
DocketCrim. No. 42432
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 138 Cal. App. 3d 976 (People v. Garcia) 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. Garcia, 138 Cal. App. 3d 976, 188 Cal. Rptr. 353, 1983 Cal. App. LEXIS 1303 (Cal. Ct. App. 1983).

Opinion

Opinion

AMERIAN, J.

Appellant Joey Maldonado Garcia, after jury trial, was convicted of murder of the second degree (Pen. Code, § 187).1 The jury found that [978]*978appellant was armed with (§ 12022, subd. (a)) and used (§ 12022.5) a firearm. The court sentenced appellant to 15 years to life, the term prescribed by law for the principle offense, imposed enhancements for the armed and use allegations and stayed those enhancements pending service of the principle term. This appeal is from the judgment of conviction and sentence.

The sole contention on appeal is that the evidence was insufficient to support the conviction. This point is urged by appellant on the strength of People v. Gould (1960) 54 Cal.2d 621 [7 Cal.Rptr. 273, 354 P.2d 865], which stands for the proposition that where a witness has been unable in trial to make an identification of the perpetrator of a crime, but has made a prior out-of-court identification, a conviction of the defendant will not stand “in the absence of other evidence tending to connect the defendant with the crime.” (At p. 631.)

Facts

On the late evening of May 25, 1981, or the early morning of May 26, 1981, the victim Phillip Perez was killed by a .22 caliber gunshot wound to the head. The victim was shot around midnight on Evergreen Street in Ramona Gardens Project. The shots came from a vehicle which drove through the project. The vehicle had two persons inside. The passenger did the shooting. A .22 caliber round was removed from the victim’s head.

There was no evidence that the victim was a member of any gang. There was evidence that appellant was a member of the Third Street gang and that on the afternoon of May 25, he went to a fellow gang member, Jose Hernandez, and asked to borrow a gun from Hernandez. Appellant related to Hernandez that when appellant took his wife and little girl home to Ramona Gardens earlier that day, “some guys from Hazard,” a rival gang whose territory includes the area where his girlfriend lives, started shooting at him and threw a knife at appellant’s car and hit his young daughter in the head. Hernandez refused to loan the weapon, a .22 rifle, to appellant and locked it in the trunk of his car. Later that evening Hernandez discovered that the rifle had been stolen from the car. The rifle was returned to the vehicle a few days later.

At 10 p.m. on May 25, appellant was with another member of “Thirds” in an Impala, burgundy on the bottom and blue on top. The car which drove by on Evergreen Street (Hazard territory) and from which shots were fired at the victim was, according to eyewitness Rosemary Torres, a burgundy or black car and, according to eyewitness Enrique Martinez, a two-tone “Monte Carlo to a Chevrolet.”

According to appellant’s girl friend, appellant was in a silver and burgundy vehicle when he dropped her off near her home in the late evening of May 25.

[979]*979Several days after the shooting incident, appellant shaved off his facial hair, consisting of a mustache and goatee. One month after the shooting, the appellant told Ophelia Lopez, a sister of his girl friend and a neighbor of his brother, that “he was mad at the Hazard Street gang members for throwing a knife at his baby on the 25th of May, and that he went along with the Third Street gang members back down there. However, he did not do the shooting, one of his members did.”2

No witness at trial testified as to the identity of the perpetrator of the homicide, although Rosemary Torres was in a position to see the gunman and had made an out-of-court identification of appellant as the gunman. Miss Torres was a 16-year-old who lived with her family in a two-story apartment in Ramona Gardens Project. Miss Torres had gone to school with another sister of appellant’s girl friend and knew appellant before the incident. At the time of the shooting she was in an upstairs bedroom which faced the street where the shooting occurred. She testified that she was looking out the window, saw a car approach at 10 miles per hour and heard shots. She saw two people in the front seat. The car went up the street, proceeded in the opposite direction and passed in front of her apartment again. Miss Torres heard another shot.

Miss Torres told a police detective several days after the shooting that she could not identify anybody. A police officer testified that about a month later she told him she was positive defendant was in the passenger seat the first time the vehicle came by, although she could not be sure who was sitting where when the vehicle made its return trip. At trial, when asked if she made such statements one month after the incident, Miss Torres replied that she could not remember.

After the shooting Miss Torres was shown photographs by a police detective. She originally selected the photograph of a person other than appellant as the person who fired the shots. Approximately six weeks after the killing, in the district attorney’s office in downtown Los Angeles, Miss Torres was shown additional photographs by investigators and selected appellant as the shooter.

At the preliminary hearing, Miss Torres stated she did not get a good look at the person who did the shooting and she did not identify anyone. At trial, she stated she did not see in the courtroom the passenger in the burgundy vehicle. She denied that she was afraid of appellant, although she admitted that she had theretofore told a detective she was afraid of appellant. She admitted on the [980]*980stand that the Thirds had hassled her once and threatened her once but stated that she was not afraid of Thirds.3

The interview in the district attorney’s office was tape recorded and a portion of it was played to the jury at trial. In the interview, Miss Torres stated that she had seen appellant lean out of the vehicle and shoot a rifle in the early morning hours of May 26. However, on the stand, Miss Torres denied that the statement was truthful. She contended that she had made the statement to get the investigator to “stop bugging her” and because the police said they had appellant’s fingerprints.4 In a portion of the interview which was not recorded, Miss Torres told a deputy district attorney that she had identified the photograph other than appellant because she had been afraid to identify someone else. A few minutes later she identified appellant as the person who fired the shots on May 25.

Law

In People v. Gould, supra, 54 Cal.2d 621, two defendants were convicted of burglary. A woman returned to her apartment after a few minutes at the swimming pool area and confronted two men. One was on the steps outside her door and the other was inside her apartment. The man inside ordered her into the apartment. She complied. The two men ran away and she saw them again while looking out her window. Within an hour the police showed the victim seven to ten small photographs. She selected two. The photograph of defendant Gould was designated by her as the man inside her apartment. The photograph of defendant Manidas was selected as the person on the steps.

At trial the victim was unable to identify either Gould or Manidas. She said Gould had “some features but not all of the features” of the man inside the apartment but he seemed to be thinner than the burglar.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

Inman v. Inman
648 S.W.2d 847 (Kentucky Supreme Court, 1982)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
138 Cal. App. 3d 976, 188 Cal. Rptr. 353, 1983 Cal. App. LEXIS 1303, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-garcia-calctapp-1983.