Supreme Court Upholds Death Sentence for Man Guilty in 2002 East Tennessee Murders

The Supreme Court has affirmed the convictions and sentences of death for Howard Hawk Willis for killing two East Tennessee teenagers and dismembering one of them. 

In 2010, a Washington County jury convicted Mr. Willis of two counts of premeditated murder and one count of felony murder in the perpetration of a kidnapping, for the 2002 deaths of 17-year-old Adam Chrismer and his 16-year-old wife, Samantha Chrismer. The jury sentenced Mr. Willis to death on each conviction.  In 2015, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the convictions and the sentences of death.

On appeal to the Supreme Court, Mr. Willis argued that the trial court should have excluded certain incriminating statements he made to his ex-wife because she was acting as an agent of the government at the time the statements were made. Mr. Willis made the statements to his ex-wife during in-person meetings with her at the Washington County jail and at a detention facility in New York, and also during recorded telephone calls from jail.  He claimed that the admission into evidence of the statements violated his right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Court held that there was no violation of Mr. Willis’s right to counsel. The Court first noted that Mr. Willis made some of the incriminating statements to his ex-wife before he was indicted, and he had no constitutional right to counsel at that time. After Mr. Willis’s indictment, the State discouraged the ex-wife from having any further contact with Mr. Willis, and he did not offer proof at trial that the State agreed to have the ex-wife act as its agent or that the State had any control over her actions. Consequently, as to incriminating statements Mr. Willis made in person to his ex-wife after his indictment, the proof showed only that the State willingly accepted information from a cooperating witness.

Finally, as to Mr. Willis’s incriminating statements made by telephone, Mr. Willis admitted that every telephone call he made from jail was preceded by a recording that informed him that all calls are subject to monitoring and recording, so he implicitly consented to the monitoring and recording of his telephone conversations with his ex-wife. The Court held, then, that the admission into evidence of the incriminating statements did not violate Mr. Willis’s constitutional rights.  

After a full review of the record and all of the evidence, the Court concluded that the proof fully supported the convictions and the sentences of death.

Chief Justice Sharon G. Lee filed a separate concurring opinion, in which she agreed that Mr. Willis’s death sentence is proportionate to the penalties imposed in similar cases but reiterated her disagreement with the manner in which the Court conducts proportionality review.

Read the Court’s opinion in State v. Howard Hawk Willis, authored by Justice Holly Kirby, and the separate opinion of Chief Justice Lee.