The Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld a jury’s verdicts convicting a Memphis man and sentencing him to death for killing his wife by beating her in the head and face with a skillet and a horse shoe after she told him she wanted a divorce.
Justice Janice Holder, writing for a majority of the court, said issues raised by Robert Faulkner in his automatic direct appeal “do not warrant relief.” She was joined in the opinion, affirming a Court of Criminal Appeals decision, by Chief Justice Frank F. Drowota, III, and Justices E. Riley Anderson and William M. Barker.
Justice Adolpho A. Birch, Jr., wrote a separate concurring/dissenting opinion in which he agreed with the majority that Faulkner’s conviction for premeditated first degree murder should be upheld, but disagreed as to the sentence of death.
Faulkner killed his estranged wife, Shirley Faulkner, around midnight on Jan. 21, 1999. Three days earlier she had filed a complaint with the Memphis Police Department alleging her husband had hit and threatened to kill her.
Faulkner turned himself in to authorities on Jan. 24. He said he had wanted to reconcile with his wife, but she “just wanted the divorce.” He claimed he and the victim were arguing “and everything just exploded” so he began repeatedly striking her with the skillet and horse shoe.
“Faulkner estimated that he struck his wife between seven and eight times,” Holder wrote. “He acknowledged that the victim fell to the floor after the second blow and that he continued to hit her while she was on the floor. After the attack, Faulkner put the murder weapons in a bag and drove away in the victim’s car.”
At the penalty phase of Faulkner’s trial, the jury determined that the aggravating circumstance - his prior convictions for violent felonies - outweighed mitigating evidence presented by the defense, including testimony from a psychologist concerning the abuse and neglect Faulkner suffered as a child. His prior felony convictions were in 1976, when he was convicted of assault with intent to commit first degree murder, assault with intent to commit robbery and assault with intent to commit voluntary manslaughter, and in 1984 when he was convicted of four robberies and second degree murder.
In addition to issues raised by Faulkner and rejected by the Supreme Court, the majority found that the sentence of death was not “disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases.” By state law, the Supreme Court conducts a “comparative proportionality review” of each capital case to determine if it is “plainly lacking in circumstances consistent with those in similar cases in which the death penalty has been previously imposed.”
Holder wrote that after an “exhaustive review” of the record in Faulkner’s case and reports concerning other death penalty cases, the sentence he received was not excessive or disproportionate.
“. . . Our review requires that we identify an aberrant death sentence by determining whether the case is plainly lacking in circumstances consistent with those in similar cases in which the death penalty previously was imposed,” Holder wrote. “. . . We are of the opinion that the sentence of death in this case is not excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases, considering both the nature of the crime and the defendant.”
In his concurrent/dissenting opinion, Birch said the “protocol” used for comparative proportionality review is “inadequate to shield defendants from the arbitrary and disproportionate imposition of the death penalty.” He cited previous cases in which he has dissented because of his concerns about the method used for the review.
“As previously discussed, I believe that the three basic problems with the current proportionality analysis are that: (1) the proportionality test is overbroad, (2) the pool of cases used for comparison is inadequate, and (3) review is too subjective,” Birch wrote.
The court set an Aug. 18, 2005, execution date for Faulkner, who has state and federal appeals remaining. The legal process in death penalty cases is explained on the court system website at www.tsc.state.tn.us under “Information” and “Capital Case Information.”