The court issued the unanimous 16-page unpublished decision on Friday, denying 45-year-old Andre Lafayette Stevens' appeal. The justices denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus in a separate order.
The decision's author, Justice Patricia Sepulveda, wrote that there was “overwhelming evidence of defendant's guilt for deliberate and premeditated murder.”
In September of 2007, a jury convicted Stevens of first-degree murder for the stabbing death of 41-year-old John Rayford McCoy. They also found true a special allegation of use of a knife and a previous strike for a 1990 robbery in Santa Barbara County, as Lake County News has reported.
A month later, Judge Robert Crone sentenced Stevens to 52 years to life in prison.
Stevens admitted to stabbing McCoy because he believed McCoy had sex with his girlfriend, who Stevens reportedly had threatened to kill previously.
Several neighbors saw the confrontation at a Clearlake apartment complex, where Stevens stabbed McCoy 10 times in the neck, chest, shoulder, back and arm, according to court documents. One of the stab wounds penetrated the heart and another fractured a rib, went through McCoy's left lung and diaphragm and into his stomach.
He also suffered blunt force trauma injuries to his head, chest and leg that the autopsy revealed were consistent with being kicked, the documents reveal.
On the day of the murder, Stevens admitted to having drunk alcohol, smoked marijuana and used cocaine.
Stevens appealed his conviction, claiming four areas where the court erred: in excluding from evidence McCoy's prior drug and firearms convictions, admitting evidence about Stevens' past assaults on his girlfriend using the knife he later used to kill McCoy, failing to to instruct the jury to consider McCoy's prior threats and harm to others when considering Stevens' claims of self-defense and imperfect self, and failing to instruct the jury to consider defendant’s intoxication in evaluating his self-defense and imperfect self-defense claims.
McCoy had four previous convictions – misdemeanor counts of possessing a switchblade and violating a protective order, and felonies of discharging a firearm in a grossly negligent manner and drug possession while carrying a loaded firearm. The convictions took place between 1992 and 2003, the court reported.
Stevens argued that McCoy's convictions “should have been admitted to prove McCoy's character for violence, in support of defendant's claim of self-defense against McCoy's aggression.”
The court said Stevens was making the argument in order to impeach McCoy's dying statement that Stevens stabbed him. Police had found McCoy dying at the scene, lying in a pool of blood, with Stevens standing nearby with the knife in his hand.
“Defendant has a long and violent criminal history,” Sepulveda wrote. “By foregoing evidence of McCoy’s criminal past, the defense avoided evidence of defendant’s criminal past, which was significantly more violent than McCoy’s. While some evidence of defendant’s past criminality was introduced at trial for other purposes, far more evidence would have been admitted had the defense offered McCoy’s criminal convictions as proof of McCoy’s violent nature.”
Stevens also had argued that the fatal fight began in an apartment and led outside, where to witnesses it seemed one-sided. He said the critical first part inside the apartment was where there was a “solid basis for self-defense.”
The court found that argument didn't hold based on the evidence – a trail of McCoy's blood that led outside and Stevens' own “scant injuries.”
During the trial, the defense council had argued that McCoy was a drug dealer and gang member, and Stevens was forced to kill him in self-defense because McCoy “was a homicidal maniac attacking him.”
The court pointed out that the argument contradicted the evidence, because the allegation that McCoy was a drug dealer was not made in court. The prosecutor pointed that contradiction out to the jury, which the court ruled was proper.
In its conclusions, the court found that the jury had rejected Stevens' testimony that McCoy attacked him and found that Stevens committed the crime with premeditation.
Stevens is serving his time at San Quentin State Prison.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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