State attorney general files response to McCandless appeal for new trial
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
WAUSAU — State Attorney General Joshua L. Kaul has filed a response to the appeal made by convicted murderer Ezra McCandless to the District III Court of Appeals for a new trial.
McCandless was convicted by a Dunn County jury following a three-week trial in October of 2019 for the first degree intentional homicide in March of 2018 of Alexander Woodworth.
The 61-page brief from the State of Wisconsin was filed October 1 with the District III Court of Appeals and responds to the five separate issues McCandless highlighted in the brief asking for a new trial that was filed in May of this year.
During the jury trial, McCandless’s attorneys had argued that the defendant stabbed Woodworth in self defense.
First degree intentional homicide in Wisconsin carries a penalty of life in prison.
In February of 2020, Judge James Peterson sentenced McCandless to life in prison and set McCandless’s eligibility for petitioning the court for extended supervision after she has served 50 years.
McCandless was 20 years old at the time that she stabbed the 24-year-old Woodworth 16 times. His body was found in her car in a Town of Spring Brook farm field on Friday, March 23, 2018.
The prosecution — Dunn County District Attorney Andrea Nodolf and state Assistant Attorney General Richard Dufour — said McCandless had lured Woodworth to his death in the farm field that was out of sight of the road.
Woodworth was a philosophy student at UW-Eau Claire and had been planning to apply for graduate school.
McCandless’s brief states that her statements to police were obtained while she was involuntarily detained in a locked psychiatric unit and should have been suppressed because the police failed to provide a Miranda warning and that McCandless’s statements should have been suppressed because they were involuntary.
The brief also states that Dunn County Circuit Judge James Peterson unduly restricted the jury’s consideration of journals written by Woodworth that contained themes of violence and expressions of desire to harm himself and others and that the court erroneously limited the jury’s’ ability to consider evidence of the psychological effects of trauma and evidence of the defendant’s psychological history and functioning.
In addition, McCandless’s brief alleges that the Dunn County District Attorney’s closing arguments were improper because the closing arguments disparaged McCandless’s defense counsel and experts and also vouched for the prosecution’s expert, which was allegedly a violation of McCandless’s right to due process.
Miranda
McCandless contends that her statements to law enforcement were obtained while she was involuntarily detained in a locked psychiatric unit, and law enforcement failed to provide a Miranda Warning to her.
The Miranda warning states that suspects have the right to remain silent, that suspects have a right to counsel and that suspects have a right to an appointed attorney if he or she cannot afford an attorney.
According to the State of Wisconsin’s brief, when McCandless first spoke with a detective on March 23, 2018, while she was in the locked psychiatric unit, Woodworth’s body had not yet been found, and the detective believed he was speaking with a victim of possible sexual assault.
The door to the conference room where the detective spoke with McCandless was unlocked from the inside, and McCandless was free to go back to her room whenever she wanted to go. She sat in a chair closest to the conference room door.
The detective left the first interview still believing McCandless was a victim, according to the state’s brief.
Second interview
After law enforcement had found Woodworth’s body, the detective returned to the psychiatric unit with another investigator to conduct another interview with McCandless the next day on March 24.
A social worker had told McCandless that police officers wanted to speak with her but that she could refuse to talk to them, according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
The detective told McCandless she did not have to speak with them and was free to leave. He reminded her the conference room door was unlocked and that she could leave any time she wanted.
Neither the detective nor the investigator told McCandless she was under arrest.
McCandless denied having any recollections of what happened until after she was told that Woodworth’s body and her car had been found.
The detective asked if McCandless would consent to having her injuries photographed, and after the photographs were taken, the detective tried to ask McCandless more questions but she declined and returned to her room.
Motion to suppress
Before the jury trial, McCandless’s attorneys had moved to suppress her statements, but prosecutors conceded that the interview with McCandless in the psychiatric ward constituted an interrogation under Miranda but that it was not a custodial interrogation because McCandless was not placed under arrest, according to the state’s brief.
Judge James Peterson denied the McCandless motion to suppress statements made to investigators because McCandless was not in custody at the time.
Judge Peterson also denied the ineffectiveness of counsel claims made by McCandless on the same basis.
The rulings made by the circuit court judge were correct, according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
The circuit court properly denied the ineffectiveness claim based on the March 23 interview because the underlying Miranda claim is meritless, the brief states.
To establish ineffectiveness of counsel, a defendant must prove both deficiency in performance and prejudice toward the defendant, the brief explains.
Judge Peterson also properly denied McCandless’s Miranda challenge for the March 24, 2018, interview with law enforcement on the same basis since McCandless was not in custody at the time, the brief states.
Voluntary
McCandless had also moved to suppress her statements from the two interviews in March of 2018 because the interviews were involuntary.
The statements McCandless made during both the March 23, 2018, interview and the March 24 interview were voluntary, according to the State of Wisconsin’s brief.
Due process requires that a statement is voluntary in order to be admissible, the brief states.
The State of Wisconsin’s brief points out that a court cannot label a statement as involuntary unless there is evidence of improper police practices that were deliberately used to obtain a confession from the defendant.
McCandless argues that she was particularly vulnerable at the time of the interviews, so the statements she gave were involuntary.
The detective did not use “accusatory questioning” because he had nothing to accuse McCandless of during the first interview on March 23 because Woodworth’s body had not yet been found, according to the state’s brief.
During the second interview, the detective told McCandless “the best way for us to help you is to try to figure out what happened in that car.”
Judge Peterson’s conclusion “that neither tactic amounted to coercion is sound,” according to the State of Wisconsin brief.
“It is settled law that police may engage in deception, including lying to a suspect, without rendering that suspect’s statement involuntary … Detective Prock’s delayed disclosure did not even amount to ‘active deception’ let alone as coercion or improper practice. After telling McCandless about finding her car, he gave her an open invitation to provide her version of events … [and] could not have ‘destroyed McCandless’s volition and compelled her to confess,’” according to the brief.
McCandless also asserts that trial counsel was ineffective because trial counsel did not obtain additional evidence regarding McCandless’s personal characteristics that would have made her statements involuntary.
McCandless believes that more information from her medical records would help establish that her statements were involuntary, but since McCandless failed to establish coercion, “her voluntariness claims were doomed to fail,” according to the State of Wisconsin brief.
Journal entries
McCandless also challenged the circuit court’s ruling about the admissibility of journal entries written by Alexander Woodworth.
Woodworth, a philosophy student who aspired to be a professor of philosophy, kept several journals.
As part of her claim of self defense, McCandless testified during the jury trial that she feared for her life because of what she knew Woodworth had written in his journals.
“Some of these writings referred or alluded to sexual, homicidal, and suicidal thoughts,” according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
McCandless introduced the journal entries as evidence to support her claim of self-defense and focused on passages that portrayed Woodworth as violent or condoning nonconsensual sex.
Judge Peterson partially granted McCandless’s motion to use journal entries “of which she was aware when she stabbed him and which contributed to her perception of the danger (that Woodworth) posed to her,” the brief states.
In her appeal, McCandless stated that the circuit court should have allowed all of Woodworth’s journal entries to be admitted as evidence “without regard for her personal knowledge of them and for the purpose of proving that Woodworth acted in conformance with a character trait for violence,” according to the state’s brief, which goes on to say that McCandless’s arguments lack merit.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that a defendant may introduce acts of the victim’s prior conduct “to establish (the defendant’s) state of mind at the time of the affray if the defendant knew about those acts before the incident from which the charges arose,” according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
“The circuit court correctly recognized that the only relevant purpose of Woodworth’s journal entries was to ‘enlighten the jury on the state [McCandless’s] mind at the time of the affray’ so that they could determine whether she ‘acted as a reasonably prudent person would under similar beliefs and circumstances … ‘the reasonableness of [McCandless’s] beliefs was not impacted by that conduct’ of Woodworth’s about which she was unaware,” the brief states.
In other words, McCandless had not read all of Woodworth’s journals before she killed him so what she did not know about the journals could not have affected her state of mind to believe she stabbed him in self-defense.
Closing argument
According to the State of Wisconsin’s brief, the prosecutor did not engage in improper closing argument, and any improper comment did not infect McCandless’s trial with unfairness.
McCandless argues that the prosecutor’s closing argument denied her due process and claims the prosecutor denigrated two of her witnesses, Dr. Steven Benson and Dr. Richard Tovar. She also argues that the prosecutor disparaged defense counsel by accusing the defense of distracting from the truth. And she claims the prosecutor improperly vouched for the credibility of Dr. Robert Tillotson, the emergency room doctor who treated her.
After McCandless stabbed Woodworth, she made her way to a nearby farmhouse in the Town of Spring Brook. The property owner, seeing that she was bloody and appeared injured, called for an ambulance, and McCandless was taken to an emergency room. McCandless had asked the property owner to take her directly to the hospital himself.
McCandless did not tell the property owner that Woodworth was nearby and was injured and bleeding.
Investigators had determined that even if someone was walking slowly, it would take about eight minutes to reach the nearby farmhouse.
There was a period of about three hours between the time a witness had seen McCandless’s car poised to enter the field driveway and the time she showed up at the nearby residence, according to information about the trial testimony included in the State of Wisconsin’s brief.
Not credible
The prosecutor argued that Dr. Benson and Dr. Tovar were not credible witnesses because they had been paid for their testimony, according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
The circuit court even accepted McCandless’s request to take judicial notice that the Dunn County District Attorney’s office had paid an outside medical examiner’s office to conduct the autopsy on Woodworth, the brief states.
The prosecutor argued that Dr. Benson was biased using Dr. Benson’s own testimony. The “hired gun” comment resulted from Dr. Benson’s testimony.
After the prosecution had cross-examined Dr. Benson, McCandless’s defense attorney asked if Dr. Benson’s opinions were “based in any way on money. Dr. Benson answered: No. I want to be very clear about that. I’m not a paid hired gun, I’m not a mercenary, and that would be very unethical. That’s not why I do this,” according to the state’s brief.
In his closing argument the prosecutor referred to Dr. Benson’s “hired gun” testimony: “And Dr. Benson, who gratuitously adds the statement ‘I’m not a hired gun,’ when nobody asked if he was or wasn’t a hired gun — he just blurts it out. He actually acted a heck of a lot like a hired gun … on cross examination. The prosecutor then recited various instances in which Dr. Benson resisted or failed to answer questions posed by the prosecutor. The prosecutor concluded that Dr. Benson’s evasiveness made him ‘sound like someone has an ax to grind in the case, someone who has an agenda in the case’ in contrast with Dr. Tillotson, who was ‘testifying about what’s best for his patent,’” according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
“With this context in mind, it becomes apparent that the prosecutor fairly accused Dr. Benson of bias. The prosecutor likened Dr. Benson’s unsolicited and vehement denial of being a ‘hired gun’ to a Freudian slip that only made him appear more like a ‘hired gun,’” the brief states.
Inconsistent
The prosecution also contended that Dr. Tovar was not credible because the report he wrote sounds like he is “supporting everything the defendant says” but “when you actually ask him questions, well, yeah, no,” according to the state’s brief.
Dr. Tovar’s statements were inconsistent with his report, according to prosecutors.
“Dr. Tovar wrote in his report that Woodworth’s injuries were consistent with being inflicted by someone acting in self-defense, even though he agreed at trial that they could have been infected by someone acting with ‘homicidal rage,’” the brief states.
“Because the prosecutor did no more than comment on Dr. Benson’s and Dr. Tovar’s credibility based on words and evidence in the record, the argument was proper,” according to the State of Wisconsin’s brief.
McCandless also faults the prosecutor for accusing the defense of “trying to distract from the truth.”
“By stating that the defense was trying to ‘distract from the truth,’ the prosecutor invoked the pattern reasonable doubt instructions that the jury had already heard. The jury had been instructed that it was ‘not to search for doubt,’ but to ‘search for the truth,’” according to the state’s brief.
Psychological evidence
McCandless also argues that her trial attorneys were ineffective for not objecting to the jury instruction regarding psychological evidence.
Part of the jury instructions informed that the jury that it was not to consider whether McCandless was guilty by reason of mental disease or defect (NGI) and to address the proper role of psychological evidence.
One of the defense witnesses had testified that how the brain responds to trauma may impact a person’s memory and testified that McCandless’s statements to the detective were consisted with someone who had been through a traumatic experience and had difficulty retrieving memories, according to the brief from the State of Wisconsin.
After the witness’s testimony, Judge Peterson was concerned “that the wealth of psychological evidence would mislead the jury into believing the trial was an NGI case … sometimes when juries aren’t told about [the lack of NGI defense] they take it upon themselves,” the brief states.
McCandless contends that her trial attorneys were deficient for not objecting to the instruction to the jury that the trial was not an NGI case.
NGI
McCandless, who was being held in custody at the Dunn County jail on a bail of $250,000 cash, changed her plea from “not guilty” to “not guilty” and “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect” in November of 2018, seven months after a competency hearing had been held and after McCandless had been determined to be competent to assist in her own defense.
Section 971.15 of the Wisconsin Statutes defines not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, which is also referred to as “NGI.”
A defendant can be considered NGI if the defendant lacks the capacity to understand his or her conduct was wrong and is so ill, he or she cannot understand what has been done is illegal.
A defendant also can be considered NGI if the person is so ill, he or she cannot control his or her actions.
In the case of a trial where a defendant has pleaded NGI, the prosecution must prove the person is guilty of the crime, and it is then up to the defendant to convince the jury that he or she is not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
In February of 2019, three months after she had changed her plea to not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, McCandless withdrew her plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
