The death sentence a Sullivan County jury imposed for a 1984 murder committed during a country store robbery is constitutionally valid, the Tennessee Supreme Court held Monday, rejecting an appeal by inmate Leonard Edward Smith and affirming the penalty.
“We have considered the defendant’s assignments of error and determined that none have merit,” Justice Frank Drowota wrote for the majority. “... The defendant’s sentence of death by electrocution is affirmed.”
Smith was convicted of first degree murder for the shooting death of Novella Webb, 59, during the robbery of a store she and her husband owned and operated. Her 79-year-old husband was injured when Smith and his friend, David Hartsock, pushed him into a trash can, breaking his ribs.
Smith, Hartsock and his girlfriend, Angela O’Quinn, had robbed another rural Sullivan County store about 45 minutes earlier, shooting and killing John Pierce. In a trial for both murders, Smith received a life sentence for his role in the Pierce killing in addition to a death sentence for the murder of Webb.
On his first direct appeal, the Supreme Court affirmed Smith’s conviction and life sentence for Pierce’s murder, but ordered a new trial in the Webb case. The court concluded the offenses should not have been joined for trial and found prosecutorial misconduct. Smith was again convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death.
Smith’s second appeal also resulted in a reversal of the death sentence. A new sentencing hearing was ordered and Smith again received a death sentence, which has been upheld.
In the appeal resulting in Monday’s ruling, Smith argued that Webb’s daughter should not have been allowed to testify at his sentencing hearing about the effect of her mother’s death on the family. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Adolpho A. Birch, Jr. agreed, writing that the “admission of victim impact evidence is unconstitutional unless its admission is thoughtfully controlled and carefully restricted.” In his dissent, Birch said “every death includes the potential to devastate those left behind,” but sentences should be based on law rather than the impact of a murder on family and friends.
“The jury’s role in capital sentencing is expressly limited to considering whether or not the aggravating factors outweigh any mitigating factors,” he wrote.
Also, Birch wrote, the testimony “invites jurors to deem it a greater crime” to murder a victim whose family and friends testify than to take the life of someone without family and friends. He said the evidence “ provides jurors with the opportunity to vary punishment according to the degree of vengeance sought by family or friends.”
A majority of the Supreme Court disagreed, citing State v. Nesbit in which the court held that impact evidence is valid when “limited to information designed to show those unique characteristics which provide a brief glimpse into the life” of the victim. In the opinion, the court set guidelines for victim impact evidence and said it may be disallowed if it “threatens to render the trial fundamentally unfair or poses a danger of unfair prejudice.”