McCoy v. State

Full title: QUINTRELA SHAREA McCOY, Appellant v. THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee

Court: Court of Appeals of Texas, Fifth District, Dallas

Date published: Aug 17, 2011

No. 05-10-00137-CR (Tex. App. Aug. 17, 2011)

Opinion

No. 05-10-00137-CR

Opinion issued August 17, 2011. DO NOT PUBLISH. Tex. R. App. P. 47.

On Appeal from the Criminal District Court No. 7 Dallas County, Texas, Trial Court Cause No. F08-53891-Y.

Before Justices MORRIS, MOSELEY, and FITZGERALD.

OPINION

Opinion By Justice MORRIS.

In this appeal, Quintrela Sharea McCoy challenges her murder conviction. She claims the trial court erred by refusing her request for a jury charge on the issue of defense of a third person and by admitting into evidence a letter written by her. Concluding appellant's issues are without merit, we affirm the trial court's judgment.

Factual Background

While holding a five-month-old baby in her left arm, appellant used her right hand to stab John McKinzie in the chest with a kitchen knife. Appellant was upset with McKinzie because he was attempting to rekindle a romance with appellant's friend Terrie Sanders after cheating on Sanders with other women. Sanders, McKinzie's cousin Quintonia Alexander, Alexander's fourteen-year-old daughter Myesha Whitaker, and another woman named Juavita Hill were all present at Sanders's apartment when the stabbing occurred. McKinzie died of a single stab wound to his chest. According to Whitaker, the deceased was sitting on the couch in Sanders's apartment when appellant approached him, loudly objecting to his presence in the apartment. Appellant got in the deceased's face and continued to verbally attack him. The deceased made a gesture with his hands, then appellant began choking him with her one free hand until he could not breathe. With her other arm, she continued to hold her girlfriend's baby. The deceased got up and punched appellant in the face with his fist while she continued to choke him. He got away from appellant and started to move through the room. Appellant grabbed a knife from a table and started stabbing him in the chest. The other women in the room tried to stop her. Eventually, the deceased made it out of the apartment. At that point, he noticed that he had been stabbed. He fled to Whitaker's mother's apartment to get away from appellant. Alexander attempted to take the knife from appellant. Appellant said, "Let me go. That bitch shouldn't have hit me." Whitaker also attempted to take the knife from appellant. Appellant said, "Y'all need to let me go. That bitch shouldn't have hit me. I'm going to stab him again. He shouldn't have hit me." Appellant went to Whitaker's apartment, but she could not get inside because the door was locked. Then she went to the parking lot, sat on the deceased's truck and said, "I'm gonna wait for him to come out `cause he shouldn't have hit me and I'm gonna stab him again." In her testimony, Alexander recalled appellant angrily cursing about the deceased from the moment she walked into Sanders's apartment. After the deceased raised up his hands in a gesture to indicate that appellant was talking too much, appellant reached over and grabbed him by his throat. After that, Alexander testified, appellant and the deceased were "fighting." She was choking the deceased while holding the baby in her other arm, and he was "trying his best to get her off of him." According to Alexander, she, Sanders, and Hill tried to get appellant to stop attacking McKinzie. The deceased swung at appellant "wherever he could" to get her to stop choking him. Alexander could not say whether any of the punches the deceased threw at appellant might have hit the baby. After the deceased hit appellant in the face, appellant started swinging at him. At that point, Alexander was unaware that there was anything in appellant's hand. Eventually, the deceased broke loose from appellant and left the apartment. Alexander followed him. Outside, Alexander saw blood on the deceased's shirt and told him he was bleeding. He raised up his shirt and said, "Yes. She stabbed me Cuz. She stabbed me." Alexander dialed 911 and tried to keep appellant, who was still holding the knife at the time, from following the deceased to her apartment. Sanders got the knife from appellant, then Alexander saw appellant go to stand in front of the deceased's truck. Sanders also testified for the State. She said that she had broken up with the deceased approximately two months before the offense because she discovered he had been seeing two other women. Appellant knew about the deceased's involvement with the other woman. The day of the offense, Sanders confronted appellant about leaving the deceased a threatening message on his cell phone. She told appellant not to leave any more threatening messages. Appellant responded, "Whatever," and walked to her girlfriend's apartment. Later, she sent this text message to Sanders: "Gurl stop! If yall get bak together its not going to b good I will beat u up cryin out 4 me!" Sanders also recalled appellant insulting the deceased from the moment she walked into Sanders's apartment. Sanders told appellant to leave the deceased alone and stay out of her relationship with him. Appellant said no. When Sanders saw appellant attacking the deceased, she ran over to appellant and grabbed her from the back. At that point, she saw the knife in appellant's hand. She got between the deceased and appellant so he could get up from the couch. Then she grabbed the baby from appellant because the baby had moved in appellant's arm during the fighting "to where she had the baby in a choke hold." Hill then took the baby from Sanders. Appellant lunged at the deceased again, and Sanders grabbed appellant's hand holding the knife and "slammed her down." She pleaded with appellant not to stab the deceased while he got out of the apartment with Alexander. When Hill pointed out to Sanders that she had blood on her arm, she realized that appellant had already stabbed the deceased. Sanders testified that she chased appellant to Alexander's apartment, trying to get the knife from her. Eventually, the two were choking each other until Sanders slammed appellant into a brick wall. Sanders was then able to loosen appellant's hand enough to take the knife from her. Appellant was still protesting that the deceased had hit her and she was going to "get him" because he hit her. Sanders testified that the knife appellant used in the stabbing did not belong to her and she had never seen it before that day. Sanders testified that she and others believe appellant was angry at the deceased because appellant had a "crush" on Sanders. Sanders stated that appellant and her girlfriend had pulled knives on each other during arguments in the past and had gotten into fist fights that she and the deceased had to break up. Appellant testified in her defense. She admitted she had her former girlfriend's five-month-old baby girl in her arms when she arrived at Sanders's apartment. She claimed that after the deceased made a gesture that she was talking too much, he hit her head and she hit him back. She claimed they were "tussling" while she continued to hold the baby. When asked if the deceased had hit the baby, appellant responded, "I was so into it, I couldn't just tell you. I know the baby — Somebody took the baby out of my hands." Appellant stated that she did not choke the deceased. According to her, "He muffed me or tilted my head, and I hit his head back. He hit me first." Appellant claimed she did not bring the knife into Sanders's apartment but rather found it on top of the coffee table. She stated:

I was just trying to defend [the baby] and I was trying to just get anything — anything to get him off me and I got the knife I just swung it. I wasn't trying to hit him. I wasn't trying to hurt [the deceased]. I really wasn't. I'm telling you the honest to God truth, I really wasn't. . . . .

When asked what her purpose was, appellant replied, "Just get him off me. That's it. I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. It was just a mistake. A mistake." She admitted she picked up the knife from the table and swung it at him after the deceased had fallen onto the couch. When asked by defense counsel if she knew what can happen if a five-month-old baby is hit with a closed fist, appellant replied that she knew the baby could die. She claimed that while the deceased was swinging at her, she was thinking about "[p]rotecting me and the baby, mostly the baby." Appellant stated she had "no clue" what she was going to do with the knife when she left Sanders's apartment. She claimed she stayed at the scene because she wanted to see if the deceased was okay. She stated that she was not trying to hurt anybody and that the stabbing was "just a mistake." Appellant claimed she did not remember sending Sanders the threatening text message that day. According to appellant, when she and her former girlfriend had an argument involving a knife, it was her former girlfriend rather than appellant who had wielded the knife. In her statement to police on the date of the offense, appellant described the events as follows: "[The deceased] muffed me and I muffed him. I was holding a 5 mo old baby when he hit me in the face. I grabbed a knife off the table and stabbed him. He hit me again and Miss Veita took the baby."

Discussion

In her first issue, appellant complains the trial court erred in denying her request for a jury instruction on the issue of defense of third person. A defendant is entitled to an instruction on every defensive issue raised by the evidence regardless of the strength of the evidence. Kennedy v. State, 193 S.W.3d 645, 653 (Tex. App.-Fort Worth 2006, pet. ref'd). A person is justified in using deadly force to protect a third person so long as she reasonably believes that the third person would be justified in using deadly force to protect herself. Moreover, the actor must reasonably believe her intervention is immediately necessary to protect the third person. Id. An defensive element is "raised" if, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the defense, there is evidence that a rational juror could accept as sufficient to prove the defense. See Shaw v. State, 181 S.W.3d 450, 452 (Tex. App.-Waco 2005), aff'd, 243 S.W.3d 647 (Tex. Crim. App. 2007). Here, the only testimony arguably supporting the submission of a jury instruction on defense of a third person came from appellant, who claimed that she was aware a punch from the deceased could kill the baby she was holding in her left arm. She admitted, however, that she did not recall the deceased ever hitting the baby. Nor did any testimony at trial show the deceased ever swung at appellant in any way that threatened deadly force against the baby. Appellant also admitted that at the time she picked up the knife and stabbed the deceased, he had just toppled onto the couch after scuffling with appellant. By her own version of events, appellant escalated a fight involving a few thrown punches into a knife wound to the deceased's chest, and she did so after provoking the fight with the deceased — holding the baby the entire time. If she truly feared for the baby's safety, she was surrounded by other women in the room who would have taken the baby from her. And the record shows that she continued to pursue the deceased with the knife even after she no longer held the baby and knew she had already stabbed the deceased once. Appellant's purported beliefs about the immediate necessity of deadly force against appellant to protect the baby were not reasonable. We conclude the trial court did not err in denying appellant's request for a jury instruction on defense of a third person. We resolve appellant's first issue against her. In her second issue, appellant complains that the trial court abused its discretion by admitting into evidence a letter she had written to her cousin from jail. In the letter, appellant complains about her fellow prisoners and some of her acquaintances. She concludes the letter, "I'm going to keep my head up and I'm going to fuck these messy hoes." At trial and on appeal, appellant contends the relevance of this evidence was substantially outweighed by its danger to unfairly prejudice the jury against her. See Tex. R. Evid. 401, 403. Regardless of whether the trial court abused its discretion in admitting the evidence, however, appellant was not harmed. See Tex. R. App. P. 44.2(b). The record in this case is replete with profanity-laced complaints and threats by appellant against the deceased on the day of the offense. She threatened him by phone and threatened him in person before carrying out her threats. The record contains an additional threat appellant made against Sanders the day of the offense regarding Sanders's choice to reconcile with the deceased. Even if appellant's letter from jail had been excluded from the trial evidence, the jury was not going to see appellant as a docile character after hearing several witnesses describe how she attacked the deceased while recklessly still clutching her girlfriend's baby and attempted to continue the onslaught even after she knew the deceased had been stabbed and the baby had been taken from her. We conclude any error in admitting the letter into evidence did not affect appellant's substantial rights. See id. We therefore resolve appellant's second issue against her. We affirm the trial court's judgment.