State v. Harris

825 S.W.2d 644, 1992 Mo. App. LEXIS 298, 1992 WL 31810
Missouri Court of Appeals·Decided February 25, 1992·No. 57349, 58824·Published·Cited by 22 cases

Opinion

SATZ, Judge.

A jury convicted defendant, Jerome Harris, of murder, second degree, § 565.021 RSMo 1986 1 , and armed criminal action, § 571.015. The court sentenced him as a prior and persistent offender to a total of fifty years imprisonment.

Defendant appeals from his convictions and sentences and from the denial of his Rule 29.15 motion. We affirm.

Defendant makes two threshold, interrelated arguments. He argues that the state failed to make a submissible case on murder, second degree, and, if a submissible case were made on that charge, he argues, the trial court improperly refused to instruct on the lesser included offense of involuntary manslaughter. Neither argument has merit.

To determine whether the state made a submissible case, we accept as true all evidence and permissible inferences which support the verdict, reject all contrary evidence and inferences and determine whether the evidence, so viewed, is sufficient for twelve reasonable people to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. State v. Sanders, 741 S.W.2d 739, 741 (Mo.App.1987).

Late one night in October, 1988, the victim, McArthur Carter (Carter), and Jerome McCoy (McCoy) were drinking liquor at the home of McCoy’s mother. Around midnight, Carter and McCoy were driven by McCoy’s brother to a liquor store. After leaving the store, Carter and McCoy walked down the street. Defendant called out to Carter from a house on the street. Defendant came out of the house to speak with Carter. After a short time, their discussion became an argument. The argument ended. McCoy and Carter walked down the street to a house in which Carter was risiding. Defendant waled away in the opposite direction.

*646 For clarity we set out a picture of the front of Carter's residence.

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As can be seen, the residence is a singlefamily, one story house. It is on the north side of the street. There is a porch on its east side. The entry from the porch into the house has a storm door and a wooden door. The storm door has horizontal bamboo slats instead of glass.

Immediately east of the entry, there is a window which faces onto the porch. This window was covered with a curtain at the time of the incident. A foyer or vestibule is immediately behind the entry door, and, to the left, or west, of the foyer, there is a front room which has two windows facing south.

Carter and McCoy entered the house and “locked” the wooden front door by jamming a “two by four” against it at an angle. Carter lighted a kerosene heater in the foyer to heat some food. The house had no electricity. Shortly thereafter, while Carter and McCoy were seated in the foyer someone knocked at the front door. Carter requested the person to identify himself. He received the answer: “Jerome”. Carter told “Jerome” to leave. “[H]e didn’t feel like talking to him.” But, “Jerome” simply knocked harder on the door. Then, Carter stood up “and started hollering toward the door”, telling “Jerome” to get away from the door.

At this time, McCoy went into the front room, looked out of one of the windows and saw defendant on the porch. McCoy came back into the foyer and warned Carter not to open the door because defendant appeared to have something “like a stick” next to his leg. Defendant continued to knock on the door and began hollering. Then, McCoy heard “three pops come through the door.... [There were] like splinters of wood coming through the door.” These were bullets fired through the door near the door knob. Both McCoy and Carter dropped to the floor.

*647 About a minute later, Carter raised his head. McCoy “heard two more pops” which came from the “window on the [east] side of the door,” facing onto the porch. These were bullets fired through the lower left hand comer of the window, as you face it. McCoy saw Carter fall, crawled over to him, noticed “blood coming out of his head”, checked Carter’s pulse and found none. McCoy then ran out the back door of the house, reached a phone, phoned his mother and told her what had happened and to call the police.

Within hours of the shooting, defendant was apprehended, three or four houses from Carter’s residence. There, McCoy identified defendant as the man on the porch at Carter’s residence. Subsequently, McCoy identified defendant in a line-up. Later that morning, the police found a nine millimeter semi-automatic rifle at the house of defendant’s mother. At trial, this rifle was identified by a ballistics expert as the gun used to kill Carter.

Defendant focuses his argument against submissibility on the State’s proof of his culpable mental state. “A person commits the crime of murder in the second degree if he ... [kjnowingly causes the death of another person... .” § 565.-021(1). A person “knowingly” causes the death of another if “he is aware that his conduct is practically certain” to cause death. § 562.016.3(2) Defendant argues there was no direct evidence that he “could see what he was shooting at, nor that he knew he was shooting at Carter” and, therefore, no inference could be drawn that he was “practically certain” his shooting would cause Carter’s death.

Defendant omits the most probative evidence. Direct evidence of a particular culpable mental state is rarely available. Circumstantial evidence and permissible inferences usually provide the necessary proof. E.g. State v. Reynolds, 782 S.W.2d 793, 797 (Mo.App.1989). Here, defendant knocked on the door to Carter’s house and engaged in a “hollering” match with him. It is reasonable to assume defendant knew Carter was standing in the foyer just behind the door when this verbal exchange took place. Immediately after the exchange, defendant fired three shots in a close pattern into the door of the house, at door-knob level, with a nine millimeter, semi-automatic rifle. About a minute later, defendant shot twice more through the window located directly to the right of the door, again in a close pattern, in the lower left-hand corner of the window. The foyer was illuminated by the light of the kerosene heater. But, even if the curtain over this window kept defendant from seeing Carter, defendant still must have known Carter was in the foyer just behind the door.

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State v. Harris, 825 S.W.2d 644, 1992 Mo. App. LEXIS 298, 1992 WL 31810 (Mo. Ct. App. 1992).

825 S.W.2d 644 (State v. Harris) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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