Opinion ID: 1728613
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Recantation of Preliminary Hearing Testimony

Text: During the sentencing phase, as in the guilt phase, the defendant sought to introduce testimony from Watson's Oklahoma attorney, and the defendant's Oklahoma attorney, that Watson said she lied during the preliminary hearing in order to escape the death penalty herself. The trial court, however, sustained the State's objection to the testimony on the grounds of relevance and hearsay, finding that the evidence did not go to mitigation, but instead was an attempt to re-litigate the innocence of the defendant. The defendant contends that the trial court's ruling was erroneous because the evidence went to the statutory mitigating circumstance that [t]he defendant was an accomplice in the murder committed by another person and the defendant's participation was relatively minor. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-2-203(j)(5) (1982). In addition, the defendant argues that the trial court's exclusion of this evidence violated his rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. We disagree. Under the Eighth Amendment, which is applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, see Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 82 S.Ct. 1417, 8 L.Ed.2d 758 (1962), after restricting the class of death-eligible offenses, a state must utilize additional procedures that assure reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a given capital case. See Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976). To meet this reliability requirement, a state must permit the sentencer to make an individualized determination on the basis of the character of the individual and the circumstances of the crime. Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 879, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 2744, 77 L.Ed.2d 235, 251 (1983). Thus, the defendant is entitled to present and have the sentencer fully consider all relevant evidence in mitigation of the sentence. Skipper v. South Carolina, 476 U.S. 1, 4, 106 S.Ct. 1669, 1670-71, 90 L.Ed.2d 1, 6 (1986). We conclude that it was not error to exclude the evidence that Watson later recanted to her lawyers the preliminary hearing testimony in which she identified Howell as the triggerman. The evidence is overwhelming that the defendant was the person who killed Alvin Kennedy, and he had implicitly admitted it to a witness. There is absolutely no proof in the record that Watson was the killer. We find that the evidence of Watson's recantation was irrelevant to the mitigating circumstance set out in Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-2-203(j)(5) (1982) and to the defendant's character or the circumstances of the crime.