State v. Gourdin

549 P.3d 685

2024 UT App 74

STATE of Utah, Appellee,

v.Jerad GOURDIN, Appellant.

No. 20200091-CA

Court of Appeals of Utah.

Filed May 16, 2024

Rehearing Denied June 13, 2024

Fourth District Court, Provo Department, The Honorable Thomas Low, No. 181402519

Douglas J. Thompson and Jennifer L. Foresta, Attorneys for Appellant

Sean D. Reyes, Salt Lake City, and David A. Simpson, Attorneys for Appellee

Judge Ryan M. Harris authored this Opinion, in which Judges Michele M. Christiansen Forster and David N. Mortensen concurred.

Opinion

HARRIS, Judge:

¶1 A jury convicted Jerad Gourdin of murdering a sixty-year-old woman (Victim) in her home during an apparent burglary. Gourdin appeals that conviction, asserting that his trial attorneys rendered constitutionally ineffective assistance. In particular, Gourdin asserts that his attorneys should have objected to the State’s effort to introduce recordings of his police interviews, and that they should have done more to investigate the DNA issues in the case, including requesting copies of the State’s DNA experts’ files and consulting with a DNA expert of their own. We conclude that Gourdin’s attorneys did not render ineffective assistance in deciding not to object to admission of the police interviews. But we find merit in some of Gourdin’s arguments regarding the DNA issues, and on that basis we reverse his conviction and remand this case for further proceedings, including a new trial.

BACKGROUND¹

The Day of the Murder

[1] ¶2 In 2014, Victim lived with her adult son (Son) in a small house in a usually quiet and "safe" neighborhood. Shortly before 4:00 p.m. on May 21, Son came home from work and found his mother’s lifeless body on the living room floor; she had been strangled with an electrical cord that had apparently been taken from the back of a "boombox." Chemicals that Son thought smelled like bleach had been dumped on Victim’s body. Son began screaming for help; the next-door neighbor heard his cries and rushed over to the house. Son attempted to perform CPR, but his efforts were unavailing. While Son was attending to Victim, the neighbor called 911. When paramedics arrived, they quickly determined that there was nothing they could do for Victim.

¶3 Gourdin—who had just recently been released from prison—was living in a house two doors down from where Victim and Son lived. The owner of this house was caring for Gourdin’s one-year-old daughter, and she often allowed Gourdin’s ex-girlfriend (Girlfriend)—the girl’s mother—to live there too Upon Gourdin’s release from prison, the owner allowed him to live there temporarily also; he slept on a couch in the living room.

¶4 Directly across the street from Victim’s residence was a house the neighbors referred to as "Tweakerville," because the residents of that house had a reputation for drug use in general and methamphetamine use in particular. While Gourdin was in prison, Girlfriend had become pregnant by a man who lived at Tweakerville; despite that fact, Girlfriend and Gourdin were—at least at first—"trying to work things out." During this time, Girlfriend was "smoking weed and taking pills and doing meth," and she often visited Tweakerville. When Gourdin first got out of prison, he did not participate with Girlfriend in any drug use, but after a while he started using methamphetamine with her. By mid-May 2014, he had progressed to injecting methamphetamine intravenously, and Girlfriend felt that he was becoming "a really scary person"; by this time, their relationship had become "super rocky," and she had begun "questioning having anything to do with him because of how crazy he was" behaving.

¶5 On the morning of May 21, Gourdin—who was at that time unemployed—left the house early to try to drum up some neighborhood yardwork jobs. Gourdin asked one neighbor if he could borrow his lawnmower, but the neighbor refused because Gourdin was acting "bizarre" and made him feel "really, really uneasy." According to this neighbor, Gourdin "was grinding his teeth," was "looking past" him into his house as they spoke, and was "really sweaty." After borrowing a lawnmower from a different neighbor, Gourdin was able to obtain one mowing job, from another neighbor who testified that Gourdin made her, too, feel uneasy because he was so "nervous and fidgety." He did a "very good job" mowing her lawn, though, and she paid him $20.

¶6 Around 10:30 or 11:00 that morning, Gourdin stopped by Victim’s house to see if he could mow her lawn.² At some point during the interaction, Victim came outside with Gourdin so he could take a look at her backyard grass. Gourdin did not go into the backyard, but just stood at the fence. Due at least in part to difficulty surmounting a language barrier (Victim was a native Spanish speaker), Gourdin and Victim were unable to reach an agreement about a lawnmowing job, and Victim suggested that he "talk to [Son] when he gets home." While standing in the, doorway, Gourdin shook Victim’s hand, and Victim handed Gourdin "an address book" to write his phone number in. Gourdin took the book, but he "didn’t have a number," so he wrote nothing in the book; instead, he set the book down just inside the house on a sewing machine located to the left of the door, and he told Victim he lived just two houses down from her.

¶7 When Gourdin returned home, Girlfriend asked where he had been. Gourdin refused to answer and went "right into the bathroom" to take the first of what would be two unusually long showers that day. When Girlfriend asked why he had showered, he denied that he had and said he was just washing his face.

¶8 Around noon, Gourdin went to a nearby convenience store; the store’s clerk observed that he appeared to be "drenched in sweat" and was acting "really paranoid." Gourdin paced up and down the aisles for about thirty minutes and then spent another thirty minutes in the restroom. The clerk got "a really bad vibe" from Gourdin’s behavior and "just didn’t feel very safe."

¶9 Gourdin continued his search for neighborhood yard jobs that afternoon. One neighbor refused to answer the door when Gourdin knocked because she "didn’t feel safe" around him, especially as she noticed him looking at the sides and back of her house. Yet another neighbor, noting how methamphetamine was a problem in the neighborhood, thought Gourdin was "high on meth or something" and felt "really uncomfortable" having Gourdin at his house. Sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m., a neighbor noticed Gourdin "acting weird" because it looked like he was "trying to walk" but "wanted to run"; as she described it, Gourdin "would run for a minute and then … stop and look over [his] shoulder." The neighbor’s first thought was that Gourdin must have done something wrong. Not too long after that, Son returned home from work and found his mother dead.

The Investigation

¶10 Soon after arriving at Victim’s house on the afternoon of May 21, police officers immediately began processing the crime scene, collecting (among other things) the electrical cord that had been wrapped around Victim’s neck, Victim’s purse, which was missing about $300, and three empty bottles of cleaning agents that were located near the body: Lysol toilet-bowl cleaner, windshield de-icer, and Liquid-Plumr drain cleaner. Officers also collected a fresh-looking "Camel filter" cigarette butt with a red stripe in Victim’s backyard; the cigarette butt stood out to them because neither Son nor Victim smoked. Son later found a Walmart receipt, which detectives corroborated with the store’s video surveillance, that indicated Victim had been shopping at Walmart—and was therefore still alive—at 1:06 p.m., thus narrowing the time of death to sometime between 1:15 and 3:45 p.m. Initially, police suspected that Son might have had something to do with his mother’s death, but he had an ironclad alibi: police could confirm his presence at his workplace all day. Police then began speaking with various neighbors, an exercise that led them to start investigating Gourdin.

¶11 The police spoke with Gourdin three times during their investigation. The first encounter was on the evening of the murder, when police informally questioned Gourdin outside his house as part of their initial neighborhood canvass. During this discussion, Gourdin said he had visited Victim’s house that morning to ask for work but had been unable to effectively communicate with her due to a language barrier, so he "just left."

¶12 The second encounter occurred the following day—on May 22—when Gourdin voluntarily went to the police station to make a formal statement. By that point, police considered Gourdin a "person of interest" in their investigation. During this encounter, Gourdin provided some additional details about his May 21 visit to Victim’s house: he had been at Victim’s door and had "[p]ossibly" stepped "just inside the doorway," but he had made no physical contact with her. During this interview, Gourdin also told officers that, at some point after police began questioning people in the neighborhood, Girlfriend made statements to him openly wondering about Gourdin being "gone" at times on the day of the murder, statements Gourdin interpreted as Girlfriend indirectly accusing him of being involved. Gourdin told officers that he responded to Girlfriend’s statements by denying any involvement in Victim’s murder, telling Girlfriend that he had "nothing to hide." Gourdin also told officers that he had recently been in "altercations" with the residents of Tweakerville "because [his] kid was over there and they all smoke dope." Officers recorded this entire interview, and it was eventually played for the jury at trial in video format.

¶13 The third encounter occurred five days later in the county jail, where Gourdin was in custody for allegedly assaulting one of the residents of Tweakerville in an apparently unrelated incident. By this time, Gourdin was "a lot higher on the radar" for police "as far as a suspect in this case." Officers...