Holmes v. South Carolina, U.S. Supreme Court 04-1327 - defendant’s federal constitutional rights are violated when a rule of evidence precludes him from entering evidence that a third party committed the crime charged when the prosecution has introduced evidence that strongly supports a guilty verdict against the defendant.
Holmes v. South Carolina, 04-1327 was decided on May 1, 2006. Read the slip opinion here.
Holmes was convicted of Murder in South Carolina. On appeal, he complained that the South Carolina rules of evidence curtailed his defense. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Alito, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction because he “did not have a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.”
Georgia’s rule is very similar to South Carolina’s.
Read the “Some Other Dude Done It” section of the Daniel’s Georgia Handbook on Criminal Evidence (4-25 in the 2004 edition) and let’s start a discussion on whether this case will have any significant impact in Georgia.
For those of you that don’t have the book read: Bradford v. State, 204 Ga.App. 568; Henson v. State,205 Ga.App 419; Klinect v. State, 269 Ga. 570; Azizi v. State, 270 Ga.App. 709; Speed v. State, 270 Ga. 688; Santana v. State, 236 Ga.App. 66.; and Sullivan v. State, 242 Ga.App. 613.
I look forward to your comments.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 2nd, 2006 at 3:47 am
Justice Alito doesn’t seem to have a problem with the Georgia rule (as expressed, for example, in Klinect, which he cites somewhat approvingly in the footnote). The South Carolina rule, apparently unlike Georgia’s, involved a type of “weighing” which empowered the trial judge to exclude direct evidence that a named other person committed the crime, if the state’s case was sufficiently strong. In Georgia, however, this type of weighing does not occur. The cases which typically exclude defense evidence that some other dude did it, involve un-named other perpetrators (e.g., “A similar crime was committed by some other person when I was in jail; and I want the jury to hear about that, because the jury can believe that the perpetrator of the other crime — whover that may be — is likely the perpetrator of the crime that I am charged with”). The other type of case which frequently arises in Georgia involves the method by which the evidence is tendered (i.e., the other person’s out-of-court confession), as opposed to the admissibility of the evidence as a matter of relevance law. Nevertheless, Holmes certainly should loosen the reigns in Georgia to some extent.