Smith v. Commonwealth

LAWRENCE ROOSEVELT SMITH v. COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA

No. 0560-21-1

Court of Appeals of Virginia

April 26, 2022

From the Circuit Court of the City of Newport News Bryant L. Sugg Judge

Catherine A. Tatum, Assistant Public Defender, for appellant.

Craig W. Stallard, Senior Assistant Attorney General (Mark R Herring, Attorney General; Maureen E. Mshar, Assistant Attorney General, on brief), for appellee. ^[1]

Present: Judges Beales, AtLee and Chaney Argued at Norfolk, Virginia

MEMORANDUM OPINION ^[*]

RICHARD Y. ATLEE, JR. JUDGE

Following a jury trial, the Circuit Court of the City of Newport News ("trial court") convicted appellant Lawrence Roosevelt Smith of first-degree murder, in violation of Code § 18.2-32. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. On appeal, Smith contends that the trial court erred by denying his motion for a mistrial based on alleged witness misconduct. He also argues that the evidence was insufficient to prove premeditation. For the following reasons, we affirm the trial court's judgment.

I. Background

In accordance with familiar principles of appellate review, we state the facts "in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, the prevailing party at trial." Gerald v. Commonwealth, 295 Va. 469, 472 (2018) (quoting Scott v. Commonwealth, 292 Va. 380, 381 (2016)). In doing so, we discard any of Smith's conflicting evidence, and we regard as true all credible evidence favorable to the Commonwealth and all inferences that may reasonably be drawn from that evidence. Id. at 473.

On the afternoon of April 1, 2018, Smith ate Easter dinner at the apartment of his girlfriend, Laquita Ball, and her two children: Karon, an eighteen-year-old son; and J.B., a minor daughter. Laquita excused herself while her children were eating and went upstairs to shower in her bedroom's interior bathroom. While Laquita was upstairs, Smith remarked to the children that their mother was "not going to cook another big dinner like this in a while." J.B. and Karon napped after finishing their meal.

Around 4:00 p.m., J.B. and Karon awoke to their mother's screams coming from her bedroom. They hurried upstairs to find that two locks secured the bedroom door from the inside, forcing Karon to break through the door using a knife from the kitchen. Once inside the bedroom, J.B. and Karon discovered that the interior bathroom door was also locked. Dropping the knife, Karon "kicked the bathroom door open" to reveal Smith inside standing over Laquita, who was nude and "looked like [Smith] had tried to knock her out or something." Laquita implored her children to "get help" as she ran out of the bathroom and collapsed on the bedroom floor. Karon attempted to prevent Smith's escape, but Smith "rushed on [Karon]" after bursting from the bathroom. The two men "wrestl[ed]" until Smith "broke away," running downstairs and out the front door of the apartment.

J.B. saw Smith holding "something sharp" in his hand as he fled but was uncertain whether it was a knife. She observed injuries on her mother's chest and blood covering the bathroom's walls and floor; she did not see any injuries or blood on Smith. From an upstairs window, J.B. watched Smith get into a vehicle, which drove away. Karon called 911 and waited with his sister for police to arrive.

Taisha Price, Laquita's downstairs neighbor, called the police after hearing "crying and screaming" and people "running back and forth" in the apartment above her. She heard someone "run down the stairs" and saw Smith walk "right past [her] window" holding "something that looked like a screwdriver." Police arrived "about three or four minutes" later.

At 5:43 p.m., Newport News Police Officer Robert Potts arrived at the apartment to find people outside the building screaming and Karon and J.B. "screaming from [the] apartment crying for help" for their mother. In the upstairs bedroom, Potts found Laquita lying face down, "naked on the floor with blood on the floor and on her person." "[U]nresponsive but breathing," Laquita had a "stab wound on her back . . . and more stab wounds on her chest, and on her cheek and hands." Potts noticed a "butter knife on the floor" by the bathroom's entrance and "[a] lot of blood on the walls and on the sink, bathtub, the floor, pretty much everywhere in the bathroom." Potts rendered first aid and accompanied Laquita during transport to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 7:22 p.m.

Assistant Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Wendy Gunther, after being certified as an expert in forensic pathology, testified that she had performed an autopsy and concluded that Laquita died from "[s]tab wounds to the chest." Gunther observed that Laquita had "a lot of sharp force trauma," with "scattered [stab] wounds all over her [body]," including at least four to her chest and three to her cheek. Two of the cheek wounds "went through the mouth and may have knocked out one of [Laquita's] teeth." Two of the chest wounds were fatal, with one piercing the heart and the other a lung. Gunther observed that some of the stab wounds did not "look exactly like knife wounds." Based on their dimensions, she determined that the wounds were caused by an object "hit[ting] the body at different angles and sometimes it just skeered[^[2] off the skin and other times had gone all the way in." Gunther could not determine what specific implement caused Laquita's injuries or whether her attacker used a single weapon. Nonetheless, she concluded that some of the stab wounds could have been inflicted with "the typical kitchen knife or combat knife," others could have been from a "screwdriver" or similar object, and all the wounds "looked like they were [caused by a] 3/8 by 3/8 instrument that left the kind of star-shape, cross-shape mark."

Gunther also discovered evidence of "defensive wounds" and "blunt force trauma" on Laquita's body. She explained that several of the stab wounds to Laquita's hands and forearms were typical of a person "trying to fend off the attack of an object." Gunther also testified that contusions patterned Laquita's arms in the "same distribution as you would expect if someone had grabbed a person and held them hard enough to bruise them in areas unlikely to occur from a fall." Additionally, from marks and bruising on Laquita's face and neck, Gunther concluded that "somebody may have grabbed her by the throat hard enough to bruise her."

Police gathered evidence at the apartment following Laquita's death. Inside the bathroom, police discovered knives, scissors, a pen, and Laquita's clothing. In the bedroom, police found a knife handle on the bed, a tool bag containing several screwdrivers, and a long screwdriver on top of the dresser.

Smith was arrested on the same day as the incident. At the station, in the interview room, police photographed his left hand, which "was still bleeding fairly quickly" under a bandage. Smith explained that he "got a little cut." Smith told Detective Thornton, who interviewed him at the station, that he had been dating Laquita for the past year and that they had argued the previous Saturday regarding her relationship with a former lover. The week before, he had confronted Laquita about "talking to [the other man] on the phone." During the ensuing argument, Laquita told Smith that the other man "got her heart and she still have [sic] his." Smith told Laquita "[he] wanted to kill [him]self . . . on the bed." He claimed that, leading up to Easter, he and Laquita were "still together" but he had "thoughts goin' through [his] head."

Smith admitted that he was sitting beside Laquita's bed after Easter dinner when he overheard her in the bathroom "talkin' to [the other] dude on the phone" and that this had "kinda bothered [him] all week." He confessed that overhearing Laquita's conversation "made a part of [him], ain't never came out before," explaining that "the bad side of [him]" emerged after "[he] kept him locked up a long time." Smith admitted that he "should've just walked away and went to the gym." Instead, he retrieved a kitchen knife, because he "wanted jus[t] to scare [Laquita] with the knife." Then "it went too far." Smith described how, knife in hand, he entered the bathroom and accosted Laquita in the shower. Smith claimed that he pushed Laquita down into the bathtub "just [to] scare her" as she cried out, "[n]o Lawrence, it's, it's nothing like that, it's nothing like that."

Although Smith initially claimed that he could not recall stabbing Laquita, he later admitted that he began "pokin' her" with at least two jabs of the knife until the blade "broke inside her." Afterward, he cut his hand in the bathroom somehow when Karon "tried to come in, pushed the door and grabbed the knife." Smith then discarded the broken knife handle in the bedroom, exited the apartment, and "flag[ged] down a ride" to his cousin's house. Smith told Thornton that he changed his clothes and discarded his outfit into a dumpster before walking to a Walmart, where he called his sister. After learning from his sister that Laquita had died, he confessed to his sister, "I messed up." He then "turn[ed] [himself] in" to police, although he had contemplated slitting his wrist with a boxcutter.

At trial, Smith testified that he intended "just to scare" Laquita with the knife, but he "went too far." He admitted that he locked the bedroom door behind him before cornering Laquita in the bathroom but denied locking the bathroom door. Smith claimed that both Karon and J.B. were armed with knives as they attempted to defend their mother, but he disarmed them, cutting his left hand on Karon's blade in the process. He denied using a screwdriver or changing his clothes to conceal his identity; rather, he testified that he used a knife, but dropped it in...