State v. Mestas

2016 NMCA 047, 370 P.3d 805, 9 N.M. 669
CourtNew Mexico Court of Appeals
DecidedFebruary 11, 2016
DocketDocket 33,350
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 2016 NMCA 047 (State v. Mestas) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering New Mexico Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Mestas, 2016 NMCA 047, 370 P.3d 805, 9 N.M. 669 (N.M. Ct. App. 2016).

Opinion

OPINION

HANISEE, Judge.

{1} Defendant appeals from the district court’s judgment of conviction for burglary and conspiracy to commit burglary after a jury found him guilty of those offenses. The issues Defendant raises require us to again evaluate our burglary jurisprudence in light of State v. Office of Public Defender ex rel. Muqqddin, 2012-NMSC-029, 285 P.3d 622. We do so, and affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

{2} On October 1, 2012, Edward Fisher was working as a desk clerk and night monitor at the Motel 6 in Roswell. Mr. Fisher’s desk was behind a chest-high counter that separated his office from a lobby open to motel guests and the public. Next to the counter was a locked door that allowed Mr. Fisher and other motel employees to enter and return from the lobby area. A mechanized “shutter” or “shield” was built into a recess in the ceiling above the counter, allowing employees to completely enclose the desk area (thereby preventing any access from the lobby) by pressing a button behind the counter. The desk behind the counter contained a lockable cash drawer.

{3} At about 2:20 a.m., Defendant walked into the motel lobby. Defendant asked Mr. Fisher to reset the motel’s wireless internet router; although the testimony is unclear on this point, it seems that Defendant told Mr. Fisher that his wife was having trouble accessing the internet using the motel’s wireless network. Mr. Fisher thought Defendant was a motel guest, but in fact Defendant was a former employee of the motel.

{4} Mr. Fisher agreed to reset the router. This required Mr. Fisher to leave his desk, take an elevator to the second floor, unplug the router, wait for thirty seconds, plug the router back in, wait for another thirty seconds to confirm that the router was working, and then return to the ground floor on the elevator. Before he left, Mr. Fisher locked the door separating his desk area from the lobby and the desk drawer containing cash. However, Mr. Fisher did not activate the barrier above the counter.

{5} After Mr. Fisher left his desk, another man entered the lobby. Video evidence offered by the State and viewed by the jury shows the man putting his hands on the counter and lifting his knees onto an overhang just below the counter top. The man further ascended the counter so that his thighs rested on its top; this put the man’s arms and torso inside the clerk’s room. The man jimmied the lock on the cash drawer and took about $250. The man then closed the drawer, dismounted from the counter, and left the lobby. Defendant followed the man out of the lobby and can be seen walking away from the motel in the same direction as the man who committed the theft. The clerk testified that when he returned to his desk, “it took me a minute to realize we’d been robbed, because they’d closed the drawer again, and the lock had been forced open, instead of turned, so it looked like nothing had been touched.”

{6} Defendant was tried in the district court on charges of non-residential burglary in violation ofNMSA 1978, Section 30-16-3(B) (1971) and conspiracy to commit burglary in violation of NMSA 1978, Section 30-28-2 (1979). At the close of the State’s evidence at trial, Defendant moved for a directed verdict on the burglary and conspiracy charges. The district court denied the motion, stating that a rational jury could infer that the clerk’s desk was inside a non-public area that was closed off from the lobby by a locked door. Although the district court noted the fact that Mr. Fisher had not closed the retractable barrier over the counter to prevent access to the desk area altogether, it concluded the open space above the counter was “akin to an open window,” and that therefore the non-public clerk’s area behind the counter could be burglarized. See Muqqddin, 2012-NMSC-029, ¶ 48 (stating that “a burglary can be committed through an open window”). The jury convicted Defendant of both counts.

II. STANDARD OF REVIEW

{7} In separate points of appeal asserting error in the denial of his motion for a directed verdict, Defendant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence as to his conviction for burglary and his conviction for conspiracy to commit burglary. Regarding his burglary conviction under Section 30-16-3(B), Defendant presents a question of statutory construction that we divide into two sub-issues: (1) whether entry into the clerk’s office adjacent to and accessible from a public lobby constitutes an “unauthorized entry”; and (2) whether the clerk’s office is a “structure” that may be burglarized.

{8} In considering Defendant’s argumentthat his conduct is outside the scope of that described to be burglary by Section 30-16-3, we review the district court’s denial of Defendant’s motion for a directed verdict de novo. See State v. Baca, 2014-NMCA-087, ¶ 5, 331 P.3d 971 (“Statutory construction is a question of law which we review de novo.”), cert. granted, 2014-NMCERT-008, 334 P.3d 425, cert. quashed, 2015-NMCERT-_,_ P.3d __ (May 11, 2015). As to Defendant’s challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence underlying his conspiracy conviction, we review the record to determine whether

sufficient evidence was adduced to support the underlying charge. The test for sufficiency of the evidence is whether substantial evidence of either a direct or circumstantial nature exists to support a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt with respect to every element essential to a conviction. When considering the sufficiency of the evidence, this Court does not evaluate the evidence to determine whether some hypothesis could be designed which is consistent with a finding of innocence. Instead, we view the evidence as a whole and indulge all reasonable inferences in favor of the jury’s verdict while at the same time asking whether any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt[.]

State v. Sena, 2008-NMSC-053, ¶ 10, 144 N.M. 821, 192 P.3d 1198 (alteration, internal quotation marks, and citations omitted).

III. DISCUSSION

A. The Conduct at Issue Amounted to a “Burglary” as Defined in Section 30-16-3

{9} In State v. Sanchez, 1987-NMCA-035, 105 N.M. 619, 735 P.2d 536, this Court upheld two burglary convictions for entering a private area within a structure open to the public with the intent to commit theft or another felony. Judge Apodaca penned a special concurrence, worrying that this Court’s jurisprudence was “stepping too far afield” from the conduct our state’s burglary statute intended to proscribe. Id. ¶ 13 (Apodaca, J., specially concurring). That concern proved prophetic. In Muqqddin, our Supreme Court called into question forty years of the Court of Appeals’ burglary decisions. See 2012-NMSC-009, ¶ 1; State v. Archuleta, 2015-NMCA-037, ¶ 6, 346 P.3d 390, cert. granted, 2015-NMCERT-001, 350 P.3d 091, cert. quashed, 2015-NMCERT-_,_ P.3d_ (May 11,2015). Our Supreme Court criticized this Court’s “issu[ance of] numerous opinions that, for the most part, . . . expanded significantly the reach of the burglary statute ... without any parallel change in the statute.” Muqqddin, 2012-NMSC-029, ¶ 1.

{10} We interpret Muqqddin to require us to reevaluate our burglary precedent.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
2016 NMCA 047, 370 P.3d 805, 9 N.M. 669, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-mestas-nmctapp-2016.