Wray v. State

678 S.W.3d 431

2023 Ark. App. 465

Cameron Dean WRAY, Appellant

v.STATE of Arkansas, Appellee

No. CR-23-14

Court of Appeals of Arkansas, DIVISION I.

Opinion Delivered October 25, 2023

APPEAL FROM THE POINSETT COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT [NO. 56CR-20-189], HONORABLE CINDY THYER, JUDGE

Benjamin Bristow, for appellant.

Tim Griffin, Att’y Gen., by: Christian Harris, Ass’t Att’y Gen., for appellee.

BRANDON J. HARRISON, Chief Judge

₁A Poinsett County jury convicted Cameron Wray of one count of aggravated robbery and one count of second-degree murder. The jury sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment for aggravated robbery and six years for the murder. Wray argues that too little evidence supports his convictions, and that some shoeprint evidence should not have been admitted. Finally, he argues we should reverse because the prosecution violated its disclosure obligations under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963). We affirm.

The crimes began early on 15 April 2020. Wray had met up with Jordan Ratton, a friend since childhood, and the pair spent the day driving around in Hatton’s truck. They began drinking Jim Beam and beer around 11:00 a.m. It was a Wednesday. Wray was eighteen years old. Neither was of age to drink.

As the pair drove around Marked Tree, Ratton told Wray around 4:00 p.m. that he was going to rob a house that night. Ratton drove by the house, pointed it out, and told ₂Wray that Mack Rhoads lived there. The back yard of the house abutted the Marked Tree municipal ball fields and was accessible by an unlocked gate. Wray said in a text message to a friend that he was going to "hit a lick," that is, rob a house.

Ratton grew too drunk to drive. Around 9:00 p.m., Wray drove him to the ball field in Marked Tree. He saw Ratton take a roll of black electrical tape out of the console and a tire iron out of the back of the truck. Ratton was dressed all in black, wearing a black ski mask with a skull pattern on the front. It was too dark to see whether there were cars parked at the Rhoads house, but Wray knew the victim might be at home.

Mr. Rhoads, the victim of the brutal murder, was eighty-seven. He was found the next morning when his daughter Tom "TomBoy" Rhoads arrived at his house around 9:00 a.m. to take him to a doctor’s appointment. She found him in the state depicted in photographs presented to the jury: dead, in a room splattered with blood, with his hands bound behind his back with black electrical tape, beaten so badly that his skull was fractured in several places, one ear was almost severed, and both his eyes had hemorrhaged.

There aren’t many homicides in Marked Tree, so Officer Anthony Parker of the Marked Tree Police Department asked for investigative help from the Arkansas State Police. Agents from the Jonesboro office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation responded to oversee the collection of evidence. That evidence included muddy shoeprints on the floor inside and on the front door outside the Rhoads home that FBI analyst Michael Gorn would testify (over Wray’s objection) were made by Crocs brand shoes, consistent with a size 10. Outside, a sawhorse had been moved under a window whose screen was cut. No murder ₃weapon was found at the scene. No hair, fiber, fingerprints, or DNA evidence linking Ratton or Wray (or anyone else) to the scene was ever presented.

State Police investigators interviewed Wray a first time on May 12. He admitted spending the day with Ratton and parking near the Rhoads house. Wray claimed that after Ratton left in the ski mask, he had waited in the truck. Ratton returned after about thirty minutes wearing bloody gloves and told Wray the victim was dead. When Wray asked why he had killed Rhoads, Ratton responded, "[I]t was either him or me." The crime netted two handguns and five bottles of booze.

According to Wray, Ratton then climbed into the bed of the pickup and told Wray to drive to a spot on the St. Francis River where the two had swum. Ratton removed all his clothes and shoes—Crocs, Wray would testify—and burned them with gasoline he had brought. Ratton changed into new clothes he had also brought.

Wray’s accounts of the crime were consistent on those points. On others, the accounts differed about facts relevant to Wray’s degree of direct involvement. For example, in his first interview with State Police investigators, Wray said that Ratton had wanted him to go into the Rhoads house. Later, Wray told them Ratton had not wanted that. Wray also told officers "several" times that the stolen guns had been thrown into the St. Francis River. In one recital, Wray said that he and Ratton had thrown them there the night Rhoads was murdered. A thirty-person search team with divers could not find them. Further, forensics turned up a Facebook message (and photograph) on Wray’s cell phone, taken in his bedroom, offering to sell the guns for one hundred dollars each.

₄The guns never did turn up in the St. Francis River. More than a year after the murder, however, while acting on information from Ratton, officers found them in a ditch, The guns were too badly rusted to be of forensic use. The same day, officers recovered a tire iron from a spot in the Little River where Ratton told them he had discarded it. No forensic evidence could be recovered from it, either. At trial, Wray would insist he hadn’t lied about guns being thrown in the river, He speculated that Ratton must have gone back and dug them out of the river bottom with his toes. The river was nine feet deep there.

Wray and Ratton were charged separately with aggravated robbery, Ark. Code Ann. § 5-12-103 (Repl. 2013), and capital murder, Ark. Code Ann. § 5-10-101 (Supp. 2023). In August 2021, Ratton pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a negotiated sentence of ten years for aggravated robbery and twenty years for first-degree murder. Wray went to trial in July 2022.

At trial, the State pursued both direct-and accomplice-liability theories. In opening statement, deputy prosecutor Martin Lilly promised what might have become the centerpiece of the proof under both theories: Ratton would testify he and Wray both broke into Mr. Rhoads’s home, "burglarize[d] the home," and both men beat Mack Rhoads to death. But when the day came, Ratton refused to take the stand. Wray, the only other surviving witness, testified that he never left the truck. The only evidence the State could offer to contradict him was Gorn’s testimony that some shoeprints found inside Rhoads’s house might (or might not) have been made by Crocs that were recovered from Wray’s closet.

₅At the close of the State’s proof, Wray’s counsel moved for a directed verdict, focusing on the missing proof about what happened inside the Rhoads house. He argued the State’s evidence was insufficient even if Wray was liable for Ratton’s conduct, because the proof did not establish what Ratton did and when. As Wray puts it in his brief, "The [S]tate produced evidence that Mack Rhoads was murdered in his home, but did not offer evidence that he was robbed before he was murdered." The jury could only speculate, for example, that Ratton had used force with the purpose of committing theft—the robbery part of "aggravated robbery"—instead of burglarizing Rhoads’s house after murdering him as intended. Wray’s counsel renewed the directed-verdict motions at the close of the defense case. The circuit court denied all the motions.

The jury was instructed, without objection from Wray’s counsel, on capital murder, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and aggravated robbery. After deliberating for about three hours, the jury convicted him of aggravated robbery and second-degree murder. So Wray appealed.

I. Sufficiency of Evidence

Because challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence raise double-jeopardy concerns, we address those first. Wray’s arguments are essentially the same for both the aggravated-robbery and second-degree-murder convictions: the jury never sufficiently learned what transpired inside Mack Rhoads’s house, and the evidence that Wray was there with Ratton was either too thin (if we count Gorn’s "inconclusive" testimony about the shoeprints) or altogether absent (if we don’t). The State argues there was sufficient evidence that Wray was an accomplice to both crimes. We agree with it.

[1–4] ₆The test for sufficiency of the evidence is whether substantial evidence, direct or circumstantial, supports the verdict. E.g., Clark v. State, 2021 Ark. App. 252, at 5, 2021 WL 1992495. Substantial evidence "is evidence forceful enough to compel a conclusion one way or the other beyond suspicion or conjectura" Kolb v. State, 2021 Ark. 58, at 3, 2021 WL 926282. We view the evidence, and all reasonable inferences from it, in the light most favorable to the State, without weighing it against conflicting evidence that may be favorable to the defendant. Id. When a defendant chooses (as Wray did) not to stand on a directed-verdict motion, and produces more evidence after the State rests, we determine sufficiency from the record at the end of the case, including what was adduced in the defendant's case-in-chief. Bell v. State, 371 Ark. 375, 380, 266 S.W.3d 696, 701 (2007); Crawford v. State, 309 Ark, 54, 55, 827 S.W.2d 134, 135 (1992).

[5–9] The credibility of the witnesses is for the jury alone to determine. Burns v. State, 2023 Ark, App. 309, at 3, 668 S.W.3d 566, 569. The jury may believe all or part of any witness's testimony and may resolve inconsistencies or conflicts in the evidence. Id. at 3–4, 668 S.W.3d at 569. The jury can rely on direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, or both to convict, but circumstantial evidence alone will not sustain a conviction unless it is "consistent with the defendant's guilt and inconsistent with any other reasonable conclusion." Id. at 3, 668 S.W.3d at 569. Whether the evidence excludes every other reasonable conclusion is a question of fact for the jury. Id. And the jury can draw any reasonable...