The death sentences of two men convicted of killing an elderly couple and a father who sexually assaulted and murdered his 8-year-old daughter were upheld Monday by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The court also reinstated the life sentence handed down for a fatal shooting in Hamilton County.
Derrick Quintero and William Hall were sentenced to death for the 1988 murders of Myrtle and Buford Vester in their Stewart County home. Quintero and Hall, escapees from Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville, entered the Vesters’ home through a window, shot and stabbed the couple and stole their car.
“They obtained the vehicle they needed by murdering the Vesters in their own home, traditionally the place of greatest safety and security,” Justice Frank Drowota wrote in the court’s 3-1 decision.
A majority of the court found that the murder met legal standards for imposition of the death penalty. Chief Justice Riley Anderson and Justice Janice Holder concurred in the decision. In a concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Adolpho A. Birch, Jr. wrote that he agreed with the “conclusion reached by the majority in this case except with respect to proportionality.” Birch cited a lack of direct evidence that either defendant was the actual killer which “compels my conclusion that the punishment of death is, in this case, disproportionate.”
The court also affirmed the 1994 first degree murder conviction and death sentence of
Gussie Willis Vann, who strangled and raped his young daughter in their McMinn County mobile home.
Writing for a majority of the court, Drowota concluded that the “sentence of death was not imposed in any arbitrary fashion” and that evidence supported the conviction and death sentence. While agreeing with the majority on other issues raised in the appeal, Birch wrote a separate dissenting opinion in which he found that the trial court erred in failing to instruct the jury on a lesser offense, second degree murder. He said in spite of the “sordid nature” of the crime, “constitutional rights must be protected with equal vigor for every defendant...” Special Justice Lyle Reid, now retired from the court, agreed with the dissenting opinion.
Also in a 3-2 decision, the court reinstated the first degree premeditated murder conviction of Willie Williams, Jr. The Court of Criminal Appeals had reversed the conviction, finding that the trial judge erred in failing to instruct the jury on a lesser offense, voluntary manslaughter.
“It is uniquely within the sole province of the jury to determine how much and what parts of the evidence are to be believed and to determine whether the defendant is guilty of any one or none of the offenses,” Birch wrote in his dissent, in which Reid concurred.
Drowota, writing for the majority, said the trial court’s failure to instruct the jury on voluntary manslaughter was “harmless error.” Williams’ conviction and life sentence for the 1993 shooting death of Delaney Thomas were reinstated. Thomas was found dead in his car in a alley behind his mother’s Chattanooga home.