State v. Curtis Bolton

Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee·Decided February 25, 1999·No. 03C01-9707-CR-00255·Published

Opinion

IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TENNESSEE

AT KNOXVILLE FILED JULY 1998 SESSION

February 25, 1999

Cecil Crowson, Jr.

Appellate C ourt Clerk

STATE OF TENNESSEE, )

)

Appellee, ) No. 03C01-9707-CR-00255 )

) Campbell County v. )

) Honorable Lee Asbury, Judge )

CURTIS CECIL WAYNE BOLTON, ) (First degree murder)

)

Appellant. )

For the Appellant: For the Appellee:

Charles Herman John Knox Walkup P.O. Box 337 Attorney General of Tennessee Jacksboro, TN 37757 and (AT TRIAL) Michael J. Fahey, II Assistant Attorney General of Tennessee Martha J. Yoakum 425 Fifth Avenue North District Public Defender Nashville, TN 37243-0493 P.O. Box 386 Tazewell, TN 37879 William Paul Phillips and District Attorney General Laura Rule Hendricks P.O. Box 10 606 W. Main Street, Suite 350 Huntsville, TN 37756 P.O. Box 84 Knoxville, TN 37902-0084 (ON APPEAL)

OPINION FILED:____________________

AFFIRMED

Joseph M. Tipton Judge

OPINION

The defendant, Curtis Cecil Wayne Bolton, appeals as of right from his conviction by a jury in the Campbell County Criminal Court of first degree murder for which he received a sentence of life imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Correction. He presents the following issues for our review:

(1) whether the evidence is sufficient to support his conviction;

(2) whether a juror’s failure to reveal a relationship with an assistant district attorney general deprived him of a fair trial;

(3) whether impeachment of the defendant by a codefendant regarding the defendant’s prior bad acts denied him of a fair trial;

(4) whether the trial court erred by allowing the introduction of a diagram and the reference to a color photograph of the victim; and

(5) whether the state’s biblical reference in closing argument prejudiced the verdict and denied the defendant of a fair trial.

We conclude that no reversible error occurred.

At trial, Detective Eddie Barton of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department testified that he assisted in investigating the death of the victim, Cody Bolton, the defendant’s two and one-half-year-old son. He said he went to the defendant’s trailer at about 3:00 a.m. on November 23, 1995, after the victim was admitted to the hospital. He said Lisa Boyer, the defendant’s live-in girlfriend and the codefendant in this case, was at the trailer, and she told him that the victim had fallen out of his highchair. An autopsy photograph of the victim was admitted into evidence and reflected multiple injuries and bruises on the victim’s face, chest and arms.

On cross-examination, Detective Barton said that Ms. Boyer was very calm and unemotional when he spoke with her. He said that she relayed the following

facts regarding that night: The defendant went to the emergency room because he injured his finger at work earlier that day. The victim was put to bed and cried when the defendant left the home, and she got him up to feed him at about 11:30 p.m. She put the victim in his highchair and went to wash his tray in the bathroom, then she heard a loud bang. She found the victim lying in the floor with a bruise near his left temple, and he was not breathing. She became hysterical and slapped the victim three times on the face to get him to breathe. The last time she slapped him hard, and he started to breathe. She called her mother, then she called the emergency room to talk to the defendant. She told the defendant to come home because the victim had fallen out of his highchair, and the defendant came home and took the victim to the emergency room. She stayed home with her and the defendant’s four-week-old daughter, Alisha. The victim had been sick, and she had asked the defendant to call the clinic to get the victim an appointment, but the clinic was closed. The victim had no injuries when the defendant left to go to the emergency room for his finger.

Campbell County Sheriff Ron McClellan testified that both the defendant and Ms. Boyer gave statements at the sheriff’s office. He said he noticed a bandage on the defendant’s finger, and he asked the defendant how he injured his finger. He said the defendant told him that he injured it at work. He said the defendant told him that when he walked the victim to his bedroom later that night, the victim would not listen, and he aggravated his injury by swatting the victim on the bottom.

Sharon Sutton testified that she lived in the trailer across from the defendant and Ms. Boyer. She said that on November 22, 1995, she went to bed at about 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. She said that after she went to bed, she heard thumps. She stated that she got up and looked out of her front room window because she thought someone was on one of her vehicles. She said she discovered that the thumps were

coming from the defendant’s trailer. She said she saw a man and a woman running back and forth in the hall in the defendant’s trailer.

On cross-examination, Ms. Sutton said she had been in bed about thirty minutes when she heard the thumps. She said she gave a statement to the police in which she said she did not see or hear any children that night. She said she heard more than one thump, possibly three, and she heard the thumps between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m.

Dr. Cleland Blake, the assistant chief medical examiner for Tennessee, testified that he performed an autopsy on the victim on November 23, 1995. He said the victim had many bruises of differing ages on his body. He said the victim had fresh bruises covering the left side of his face, a bruise under the high right part of his scalp, and a broken right collarbone. He said the victim had deep bleeding under his scalp at the top of his head and in the right side of his brain under the skull. He said that this type of bleeding is caused by an impact to the left side of the head which forces the brain across the skull and causes it to bounce against the other side of the skull, tearing blood vessels and causing the bleeding. He said the victim had swelling and compression of the brain that pushed the brain stem down to the hole in the base of the skull and cut off the victim’s blood supply, ultimately causing his death.

Dr. Blake testified that the victim’s fatal injury was on the left side of the victim’s face on his jaw, left cheek, temple, and behind his left ear. He said the injury was caused by the blunt impact of a surface that pressed the left ear against the head. He said that when the victim arrived at the emergency room at 11:00 p.m., the victim was unconscious. He said the injury would have occurred two to three hours earlier, not immediately before he was brought to the hospital. He said the victim had fresh injuries on the left side of his face, the back of his head, the back of his right shoulder, and his buttocks. He said that the bruise on top of the victim’s head was consistent

with the victim falling out of a highchair, but it did not cause his death. He said it is inconceivable that the victim’s internal bleeding or brain injuries resulted from falling out of a highchair, and to receive such injuries from a fall, the victim would have had to fall more than twenty feet. He said the victim’s injuries were consistent with child abuse, and the victim’s fatal injury had to be from a very forceful blunt impact between an object and the victim’s head. He said that after the victim received the injury, he would have gradually lost consciousness, which could have caused him to fall out of the highchair. He said the injuries on the victim’s back and right shoulder and his broken collarbone show that there were definitely two impacts.

On cross-examination, Dr. Blake testified that the victim had some bruising where life support equipment was attached, but he said the bruising was different from the victim’s injuries. He said that attempts to resuscitate the victim by slapping him hard on the face would not have caused the victim’s injuries or his death. He said the victim’s bruises that were one to two days old did not contribute to his death.

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