James Thomas Jefferson v. State ( 1998 )

IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TENNESSEE
AT NASHVILLE FILED
OCTOBER 1998 SESSION
December 31, 1998
Cecil W. Crowson
STATE OF TENNESSEE, ) Appellate Court Clerk
)
Appellee, ) No. 01C01-9711-CR-00538
)
) Davidson County
v. )
) Honorable Walter C. Kurtz, Judge
)
JAMES THOMAS JEFFERSON, ) (Resentencing: First Degree Murder)
)
Appellant. )
DISSENTING OPINION
I respectfully dissent in this case. I believe that through an unfortunate
misapplication of the law, the defendant was wrongly denied a new trial as to the issue
of his guilt. Therefore, I believe that the law of the case doctrine should not be applied
and that we should grant the defendant a new trial.
I need not detail in this opinion the tortuous path of this case. The offense
occurred in 1968. In the defendant’s 1993 trial, the court applied the 1968 law which
provided that the jury decide both guilt and punishment. The trial court instructed the
jury that for first degree murder, the jury could impose a specific term of years from
twenty years to life imprisonment. The jury found the defendant guilty of first degree
murder and imposed a forty-year sentence.
However, the Tennessee Supreme Court had previously held that the
statute under which the defendant was sentenced was unconstitutional and that the
valid sentencing statute for first degree murder provided a sentence of life
imprisonment. See Miller v. State, 584 S.W.2d 758, 762 (Tenn. 1979). Thus, the
defendant received an illegal sentence.
In an attempt to correct the matter, the trial court imposed a life sentence.
On appeal, this court held that only a jury could impose the sentence. State v.
Jefferson, 938 S.W.2d 1, 21-22 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1996), app. denied (Tenn. Nov. 25,
1996). However, it affirmed the first degree murder conviction upon its determination
that in the light most favorable to the state, the evidence was sufficient to support the
verdict. Id. at 23.
The majority opinion concludes that this court’s opinion in the earlier
appeal constitutes the law of the case, which is not to be revisited. The majority opinion
sees significance in the fact that the Tennessee Supreme Court denied a further review
in that appeal. However, I believe that the law of the case doctrine should not be
absolute. If the previous decision was clearly wrong or if manifest injustice would result,
a court may revisit the issue. See Messinger v. Anderson, 225 U.S. 436, 443, 32 S. Ct.
739, 740 (1912), Davis v. Davis, 96 F.2d 512, 515 (D.C. Cir. 1938); Daly v. Volpe, 376
F. Supp. 987, 994 (W.D. W ash. 1974). Also, our supreme court has stated, “This Court
is not committed to all the views expressed in an opinion of the intermediate appellate
courts when we deny discretionary review.” Swift v. Kirby, 737 S.W.2d 271, 277 (Tenn.
1987). In fact, the court has acknowledged that “the sheer volume of intermediate
cases” that it reviews factors into its refusal to be bound by the denial of review.
Meadows v. State, 849 S.W.2d 748, 752 (Tenn. 1993). Thus, likewise for our
purposes, the fact that our supreme court denied review in the earlier appeal should not
be significant in determining whether or not the law of the case doctrine should apply.
The problem in the present case is a fundamental one. The defendant
has a constitutional right to trial by a jury. See U.S. Const. amend. IV; Tenn. Const. art.
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I, §§ 6, 9. In fact, our state constitution contemplates that “the jury shall have a right to
determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court . . . .” Tenn. Const. art.
I, § 19. In this respect, in State v. Cook, 816 S.W.2d 322, 326 (Tenn. 1991), our
supreme court stated the following:
It is widely perceived by those who observed the
operations of our trial courts in previous times, when juries had
the additional responsibility of setting punishment, that often
they seemed to find guilt of a crime not necessarily most
strongly suggested by the evidence, but one the punishment
for which suited their sense of justice for the case.
The court determined that under the statute defining the instruction for the then existing
range of punishment, “if the defendant were to be sentenced to punishments greater
than what the jury finding guilt was instructed would be imposed,” prejudice to the
judicial process would occur. Id. at 327.
I believe that it is fundamentally unfair and an improper limitation on the
right to trial by jury to instruct a jury with sentencing authority that it has the power to
sentence the defendant to forty years for first degree murder when the actual sentence
for the offense must be life imprisonment. With proper instructions, the jury in the
present case may well have considered second degree murder and a term of forty
years to represent justice in the case. What happened to the defendant is no different
than what happened to the defendant in Cook. I believe that we should give the
defendant the relief he seeks and order a new trial on both the issue of guilt and the
issue of sentencing.
________________________________
Joseph M. Tipton, Judge
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