Tennessee Supreme Court makes it easier for accomplices to testify
You’re charged with murder.
The state doesn’t have much evidence — probably not enough to convict you or your codefendant. Still, the stakes are incredibly high: If you are convicted, you’ll probably spend the rest of your life in prison.
You’re given a choice: You can risk a trial, or you can choose to testify against your codefendant. The state doesn’t have evidence to corroborate anything you say happened during the crime.
Clearly, you have an incentive to place the blame entirely on your codefendant, whether or not it’s deserved. What will you do?
For more than 100 years in Tennessee, a procedural rule would have prohibited a jury from convicting your codefendant based solely on your testimony in such a situation.
Called the accomplice-corroboration rule, it required that convictions could not be based on uncorroborated accomplice testimony unless it was corroborated by other evidence. Law researcher and professor I. Maurice Wormser wrote in 1942 that the rule was seen as a safeguard against the motives of an accomplice who ”expects to save his own skin by procuring the downfall of others.”
The Tennessee Supreme Court abolished that rule in a decision written by Justice Jeffrey Bivins on March 7, deciding to return “this aspect of factfinding and evaluation of witness credibility to its proper place before the jury.”
That decision brings Tennessee in line with most other states, which have either done away with the accomplicecorroboration rule or never had one in the first place. Thirty-three states and the federal government do not limit accomplice testimony this way.
The court’s decision relied on the fact that the rule existed in Tennessee only as common law, unlike in 16 other states that employ it through a codified statute or procedural rule. The court wrote that “the General Assembly is better suited to decide whether such a rule need be effectuated in our state.”
Lawyers have different opinions on how much of an impact it will have.
“This is a huge deal,” Willie Santana, a criminal defense lawyer and researcher, said. “This is a long-standing common law rule that is concerned with reliability, the perverse incentives codefendants have to lie/falsify (and) increased risk of wrongful convictions.”
Santana recognized that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled not to establish the accomplice-corroboration rule more than 100 years before in 1917.
“But the federal criminal system has more resources and fewer cases that make other safeguards more effective,” Santana said.
Also included in the Tennessee ruling is a provision that juries must be instructed to treat accomplice testimony with “great caution” and “not convict upon this testimony alone, unless you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that it is true.”
Nashville criminal defense attorney David Raybin said he thinks the jury instructions will make things about the same as they were before.
“I think [juries] have a healthy skepticism of accomplices,” Raybin said. “I think on balance, … the jury instruction will make it functionally about the same as it was before.”
Still, prosecutors will now be able to pursue some rare cases in which all the evidence they have is an accomplice’s testimony, although such instances are less common as technology like cellphones and GPS has progressed.
“They’ll probably reserve that for the most serious kinds of cases,” Raybin said. “So it will assist the prosecutors in those cases.”
Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk said in a statement that the ruling could affect many cases.
“The ruling has the potential to impact a large number of cases as decisions are made regarding the use (or not) of accomplice testimony in conjunction with all other factors considered in the prosecution of a case,” Funk said.
As for any impact on the actual outcome of prosecutions, the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote that it was “quite certain (that abolishing the rule) … will result in a number of outcomes going forward that would have been different with an accomplice-corroboration rule in place.”
The decision stemmed from an appeal in a 2015 homicide and does not apply retroactively. Therefore, the court overturned the murder conviction of Laronda Turner, which was reached based on the testimony of an accomplice that the court ruled was not sufficiently corroborated.
Two justices wrote opinions dissenting in part. Justice Sarah Campbell argued that the ruling should apply retroactively. Justice Sharon Lee disagreed with abolishing the rule for both procedural and substantive reasons.
First, she wrote, the state waited until the “11th hour” to ask the court to consider abolishing the rule, failing to bring it up at the trial court and Court of Criminal Appeals, and only raising the issue with the Supreme Court “half-heartedly” after defendants had filed their first written arguments to the court.
Second, Lee argued that the accomplice-corroboration rule was still necessary as a safeguard and pointed to the case in question as proof — the accomplice whose testimony was used to initially convict Turner admitted “saving himself from a life sentence was a powerful motive to lie,” Lee wrote.
“The accomplice testimony rule is established precedent, and there is no compelling reason for this Court to do away with it. We overrule our previous decisions ‘sparingly’ and ‘only when the reason is compelling,’” Lee wrote.
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @Evanmealins.