Opinion ID: 1060705
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Victim's Family

Text: With respect to the wishes of Kerrick Major's family, [8] the prosecutor made the following arguments: We are not asking you to kill anybody. Each one of you said you follow the law, and if the punishment, under the law, should be death, you swore that you could impose that verdict. That is your oath. Kerrick Majors lays in his grave, six feet under, but the last memory of looking up and seeing this defendant thrust his knife into him twice, he cries out for justice. His family asks you to impose the death penalty. The State asks you to impose the death penalty. The facts support it. He deserves it. Justice demands it on the facts and the law. In State v. Nesbit, 978 S.W.2d 872 (Tenn.1998), we held that evidence and argument regarding the impact of a crime on the victim's family are not per se improper or inadmissible under Tennessee statutory or constitutional law: the impact of the crime on the victim's immediate family is one of those myriad factors encompassed within the statutory language `nature and circumstances of the crime.' Id. at 890 (quoting Tenn.Code Ann. § 39-13-204(c) (1997 & Supp. 1998)). Nor is such evidence or argument barred by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 825, 111 S.Ct. 2597, 2608, 115 L.Ed.2d 720 (1991). Victim impact evidence and argument, however, must be relevant to the specific harm to the victim's family. It must be limited to information designed to show those unique characteristics which provide a brief glimpse into the life of the individual who has been killed, the contemporaneous and prospective circumstances surrounding the individual's death, and how those circumstances financially, emotionally, psychologically or physically impacted upon members of the victim's family. Nesbit, 978 S.W.2d at 891 (footnote omitted); State v. Burns, 979 S.W.2d 276, 282 (Tenn.1998). Moreover, we specifically noted that admission of a victim's family members' characterizations and opinions about the crime, the defendant, and the appropriate sentence violates the Eighth Amendment. Nesbit, 978 S.W.2d at 888 n. 8 (citing Payne, 501 U.S. 808, 111 S.Ct. 2597, 115 L.Ed.2d 720 and Booth v. Maryland, 482 U.S. 496, 107 S.Ct. 2529, 96 L.Ed.2d 440 (1987)). Applying these principles indicates that the prosecutor's statement, [h]is family asks you to impose the death penalty was improper. [9] Although evidence to this effect was not introduced during the sentencing hearing, and would have been inadmissible, the prosecutor's statement clearly is an improper characterization of the family's view as to the appropriate sentence.