State v. Huddleston

375 P.3d 583, 278 Or. App. 803, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 725
CourtJackson County Circuit Court, Oregon
DecidedJune 15, 2016
Docket121371FE; A157029
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 375 P.3d 583 (State v. Huddleston) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Jackson County Circuit Court, Oregon primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Huddleston, 375 P.3d 583, 278 Or. App. 803, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 725 (Or. Super. Ct. 2016).

Opinion

SHORR, J.

A jury convicted defendant of, among other things, two counts of attempted aggravated murder, ORS 163.095 (Counts 2 and 6), and one count of intentional murder, ORS 163.115(l)(a) (Count 1). On appeal, defendant raises two assignments of error, which both present the same issue of whether the trial court erred in failing to merge the convictions for attempted aggravated murder with the conviction for intentional murder. Defendant argues that, under ORS 161.485(2), he cannot be convicted of more than one count of attempted aggravated murder. Defendant further contends that, under ORS 161.485(3), the convictions for the inchoate offenses of attempted aggravated murder must merge with the conviction for the completed murder. As explained below, we conclude that the trial court did not err in declining to merge the two convictions of attempted aggravated murder with each other or with the conviction for intentional murder because defendant’s criminal acts did not constitute a single course of conduct. Thus, we affirm the trial court’s judgment.

We are bound by the trial court’s findings of fact if they are supported by evidence in the record. State v. Holdorf, 355 Or 812, 814, 333 P3d 982 (2014). We review the trial court’s merger of convictions at sentencing for errors of law. State v. Badillo, 260 Or App 218, 224, 317 P3d 315 (2013) (citing State v. Colmenares-Chavez, 244 Or App 339, 342, 260 P3d 667, rev den, 351 Or 216 (2011)).

The following material facts are supported by the record. Defendant was married to the victim, and they had a son, E. Defendant was having an affair with Roberts, of which the victim was aware. Defendant was enrolled as a full-time student at Rogue Community College and was in the paramedics program. He was taking an EMT class with his friend, Yorrie. In early November 2011, defendant and Yorrie were on a 15-minute break from their EMT class, when defendant told Yorrie that he “could not stand [the victim] and just wanted her gone.” He offered Yorrie $20,000 to kill her. Defendant outlined a detailed plan to have Yorrie kill the victim in the morning as she was headed to work. Defendant wanted the shooting to appear as an “armed [805]*805robbery gone bad.” He planned to pay Yorrie from the proceeds of the victim’s life insurance policy. Yorrie declined defendant’s offer, but arranged for defendant to meet his cousin at a McDonald’s in White City.

Around Thanksgiving 2011, defendant met with Yorrie’s cousin, Nuckolls, and defendant offered to pay Nuckolls $20,000 to kill the victim. Defendant articulated a plan to have Nuckolls lie in wait in a field near the victim’s home with a sniper rifle and shoot her as she was leaving her home. Defendant discussed an alternative plan to have Nuckolls shoot the victim at point-blank range as she was going up the stairs into her home. Nuckolls told defendant that he would consider the offer. Eventually, Yorrie and Nuckolls met defendant in a parking lot behind a Superior Athletic Gym, where Nuckolls declined defendant’s offer. Defendant responded, “Either way I’m going to get it done. I’ll find somebody else. It doesn’t matter.” Neither Nuckolls nor Yorrie took any steps toward killing the victim. Instead, defendant offered to pay Yorrie $5,000 in exchange for an alibi, if defendant ended up committing the murder.

On the night of March 22, 2012, defendant was assisting Yorrie with a project for one of his classes at Roberts’s house. Defendant left Roberts’s home to run some errands and asked Roberts and Yorrie not to call or text him while he was out. At around 3:00 a.m. on the morning of March 23, 2012, E, who was 10 years old at the time, was awakened by a scream. E saw defendant, his father, leave his parents’ bedroom, walk out to his truck with a gun, and drive away. E entered his parents’ bedroom and found the victim lying on her bed covered in blood. He called 9-1-1 and followed the operator’s instructions on how to perform CPR. The victim died shortly after the paramedics arrived.

Meanwhile, Roberts finished the class project with Yorrie and drove him home. About an hour later, at 2:40 a.m., defendant called Yorrie. Defendant told Yorrie, “Hey I’m going to make front line *** newspaper. You earned your five grand.” Yorrie initially provided an alibi to detectives, claiming that defendant never left Roberts’s house, but eventually retracted it.

[806]*806Investigators traced defendant’s phone to Roberts’s home and arrested defendant. There, in the bushes, they found parts of the pistol used to shoot the victim and latex gloves in defendant’s truck. Detectives brought defendant to the Jackson County Sheriffs office for questioning. Defendant told detectives that, on the night the victim died, he had had an argument with the victim in their bedroom regarding his extramarital affair with Roberts. He claimed that, after he left and shut the door, he heard a gunshot from within the bedroom. At trial, defendant claimed that the victim committed suicide. A medical examiner, who performed an autopsy on the victim, concluded that she was shot at a distant range, and he classified the manner of her death as a homicide.

The jury convicted defendant on all 10 counts charged in the indictment.1 At sentencing, the trial court initially merged the convictions on several inchoate offenses (Counts 2 to 9) with the murder conviction (Count 1). The trial court imposed a sentence of 25 years’ imprisonment on the murder conviction and 30 days in jail on a conviction for unlawful possession of a firearms silencer (Count 10). At some point following the sentencing hearing, the trial court determined that resentencing was necessary, but the record does not reveal why. At the resentencing hearing, the following colloquy occurred regarding merging the inchoate convictions:

“[PROSECUTOR]: [Bjased on my sentencing memorandum, under Badillo neither one of the Attempted Aggravated Murders, they were with sufficient pause, should merge into each other.
“THE COURT: Well that wasn’t even a Murder case.
“[PROSECUTOR]: I know.
“THE COURT: Badillo was a kidnapping case.
[807]*807“[PROSECUTOR]: But you have the two Attempted Aggravated Murders versus the two Attempted Kidnappings. There was a pause in those and they didn’t merge.
“THE COURT: Yeah, but there was no completed kidnapping, that’s the difference.
“[PROSECUTOR]: No, it wasn’t a completed kidnapping, but the two Attempted Aggravated Murders are not lesser included of the Murder and they said there was sufficient pause in that so that those two did not merge together even though they were closely related in time. This is a pause of months between those actual solicitation attempts and the completed murder. And the murder was completed by someone who wasn’t solicited or—yes, solicited, that’s the right term for this, to do the murder. So it’s completely separate.”

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Related

State v. Thompson
543 P.3d 1250 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2024)
State v. Breshears
383 P.3d 345 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2016)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
375 P.3d 583, 278 Or. App. 803, 2016 Ore. App. LEXIS 725, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-huddleston-orccjackson-2016.