Judges, lawyers, legal scholars, the media and others needing information about more than 500 first-degree murder cases in Tennessee can have the data at their fingertips with a new high-tech tool initiated by the state Supreme Court.
A Microsoft™ Windows 95 compatible CD-ROM, produced by the appellate court clerk’s office and the Administrative Office of the Courts, contains reports on cases and defendants dating back to the mid-1970s. The information was taken from Supreme Court Rule 12 reports submitted by trial judges across the state. The rule requires judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys to complete detailed reports in which defendants are convicted of first-degree murder, including those who enter guilty pleas. The 10-page reports include information about the victims, crimes, sentences imposed and the defendants.
The CDS are being provided at no cost to appellate judges, the Public Defenders’ Conference, the District Attorney’s Conference, the Post-Conviction Defender’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, law school libraries and the state law libraries. Others can purchase copies of the CD for $50 each. Orders should be sent to Joan Goddard, Administrative Office of the Courts, 511 Union Street, Suite 600, Nashville, TN 37243-0607. Semi-annual updates also may be purchased from the AOC.
“The court’s primary interest in the database is for comparative proportionality review in these cases, which is required by court rule and state law,” Chief Justice Riley Anderson said. “The Supreme Court reviews the data to ensure rationality and consistency in the imposition of the death penalty and to identify aberrant sentences during the appeal process.”
The state’s 1977 capital punishment law mandates appellate court review of death penalty cases to determine whether “the sentence of death is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases, considering both the nature of the crime and the defendant.” In a 1997 Supreme Court opinion, State v. Andre S. Bland, Justice Frank Drowota wrote that comparative proportionality review in death penalty cases is “not a rigid, objective test” and the “sentence of death is not disproportionate unless the case taken as a whole is plainly lacking in circumstances consistent with those in cases where the death penalty has been imposed.”
Tennessee and 19 other states adopted the review requirement in response to a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating all death penalty statutes. The court held in Furman v. Georgia that the Georgia statute, which was representative of death penalty laws in other states, “wantonly and ... freakishly imposed” death sentences. The ruling compared the imposition of the death penalty under such laws to being struck by lightning.
In response to the decision, the Tennessee General Assembly included a comparative proportionality review requirement in the state’s death penalty statute. Tennessee’s law has “been repeatedly upheld against constitutional attack and, from the raw numbers, appears to be performing its intended purpose of reserving the death sentence for the 'worst of the bad,’” Drowota wrote in Bland.