After a few months of discussing divorce off and on in 2009, Touch Choun told her husband that he needed to move out. Dennis Wayne Lambdin later allegedly told police he “just lost it” then.
Lambdin punched Choun four or five times, threw her to the floor, grabbed the biggest kitchen knife he could find and stabbed his wife at least 15 times, according to court documents. When he noticed Choun was still moving, Lambdin contended he didn’t want her to suffer and smashed her in the head three times with a heavy ceramic globe, the documents say.
The 41-year-old Choun died in the Aug. 17, 2009, attack. After he smoked a cigarette, Lambdin said, he bought rope to use to hang himself. However, he didn’t go through with it and was arrested in the slaying.
Lambdin, now 68, did not deny he killed Choun, but at trial he sought to have the murder charge against him reduced to manslaughter by establishing he was under extreme emotional distress brought on by years of marital strife and his wife’s intention to divorce him.
The jury rejected his arguments for special mitigation and convicted Lambdin of first-degree felony murder. The Cottonwood Heights man was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
In an appeal, Lambdin alleged that the jury instructions concerning extreme emotional distress were in error, but the Utah Court of Appeals upheld his conviction in 2015.
And last week, in a 3-2 opinion, the Utah Supreme Court ruled the jury instructions in the case were “an adequate depiction of the law” and affirmed the Court of Appeals.
Under Utah law, if a jury finds the elements of murder are proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the elements of extreme emotional distress are proven by a preponderance of the evidence, the verdict must be reduced from murder to manslaughter.
A jury instruction in Lambdin’s case said a person acts under the influence of extreme emotional distress “when he is exposed to extremely unusual and overwhelming stress that would cause the average reasonable person in similar circumstances to experience a loss of self-control and be overborne by intense feelings such as passion, anger, distress, grief, excessive agitation, or other like emotions.”
The instruction also said the standard is not whether the defendant subjectively thought his reaction was reasonable but is an objective standard, “determined from the viewpoint of a reasonable person faced with the then-existing circumstances.”
Lambdin’s lawyers argued in the appeal that the instruction could confuse jurors into thinking the reaction that must be reasonable is the act of killing itself, rather than the emotional reaction or the loss of self-control.
Writing for the majority, Justice Christine Durham said the language of the instruction, as well as the defense attorney’s closing argument, “make it abundantly clear that the loss of self-control is what must be reasonable, not the murder.”
Durham was joined by Associate Chief Justice Thomas Lee and 2nd District Judge David Connors, who was sitting in on the case.
The two dissenters, Chief Justice Matthew Durrant and Justice Deno Himonas, said there was an ambiguity in the instruction.
“Without a full and clear statement of the law of special mitigation by extreme emotional distress, there is an obvious risk that the jury reached its verdict based on a misunderstanding of the law,” Durrant wrote in the dissent.
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