State v. Dean

76 S.W.3d 352, 2001 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 791, 2001 WL 1150309
CourtCourt of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee
DecidedSeptember 28, 2001
DocketW2000-01156-CCA-R3-CD
StatusPublished
Cited by172 cases

This text of 76 S.W.3d 352 (State v. Dean) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Dean, 76 S.W.3d 352, 2001 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 791, 2001 WL 1150309 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2001).

Opinion

OPINION

ALAN E. GLENN, J.,

delivered the opinion of the court,

in which DAVID G. HAYES and JERRY L. SMITH, JJ., joined.

The defendant was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to forty years as a violent offender. He timely appealed, alleging, inter alia, that the trial court erred in not suppressing a confession obtained, following his warrantless arrest, after he had been jailed for five days without a determination of probable cause; in allowing DNA results into evidence; and in permitting a forensic nurse examiner to testify as a keeper of the sexual assault resource center records. Based upon our review, we conclude that testimony regarding the records of the Memphis Sexual Assault Resource Center was properly admitted as business records testimony and that the DNA evidence was properly admitted, as well. We conclude that the defendant’s confinement violated his Fourth Amendment rights and that his confession should have been suppressed. However, this error was harmless in light of the other evidence. Accordingly, we affirm the conviction.

The defendant, Anthony H. Dean, was convicted in the Shelby County Criminal Court of aggravated rape and sentenced to forty years imprisonment as a violent offender. In his appeal, he presents the following issues:

I. The evidence of appellant’s identity as the culprit is insufficient to support the verdict beyond a reasonable doubt.
II. The trial judge erred in failing to suppress appellant’s confession *357 and DNA evidence that was the “fruit of the poisonous tree” of his illegal detention without' prompt presentation before a magistrate as required by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution.
III. The trial judge erred in allowing into evidence the business records of the Sexual Assault Resource Center as business records when they were made for the sole purpose of litigation.
IV. The trial judge erred in refusing to strike the testimony concerning the DNA testing of the appellant when the State failed to satisfy the “chain of evidence” requirement for admissibility of such evidence.
V. The errors which allowed into evidence both the alleged confession and the DNA testimony were such that their cumulative effect cannot be considered harmless error.
VI. The trial judge misapplied the enhancement factors in sentencing appellant to the maximum sentence of 40 years.

We conclude that the defendant’s confession, taken on the fifth day of his confinement, following his warrantless arrest, without a determination of probable cause, was in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights although his rights were not violated by the taking of a DNA sample from him, pursuant to a search warrant, while he was incarcerated. Accordingly, it was error to admit the confession during the trial but not the DNA evidence. We further conclude that there was a sufficient showing as to the chain of custody of the defendant’s blood sample resulting in testimony that the defendant’s DNA matched the semen sample from the victim. As a result, we find that the admission of the confession was harmless. Although the trial court relied upon two inapplicable enhancement factors, the remaining factors justify the imposition of the sentence. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

DISCUSSION

The victim, R.G., 1 who was 92 years old at the time of trial, testified that as of the day of the crime, August 1, 1998, she was 89 years old, turning 90 about two weeks later. She said that she was awakened at about 4 a.m. after a man had come into her apartment through her balcony glass door. As she tried to rise from the bed, the intruder grabbed her throat and pushed her back. He tried to penetrate both her vagina and her anus, but was unsuccessful at first. However, on a second attempt, he did penetrate her vagina. As a result of the attack, the victim sustained tears and a laceration in her vagina and still had stiffness in her neck and pain in both her arm and shoulder at the time of the trial. Also, because of the position she was forced into during the rape, she had to begin using a cane or a walker, and was still doing so at the time of trial.

She testified that she recognized the intruder because he had been in her apartment the day before the attack. She had noticed him near her apartment door, and he said that he lived in a nearby apartment and had not seen one like hers. She invited him in and, during their conversation, said that she needed to have her hair cut. He told her that he was a barber and could cut her hair. He left but returned later that day, coming into her apartment without an invitation and telling the -victim that he had come to cut her hair. She told him that she did not want her hair to be cut *358 then, and he left again. While he was in her apartment, she told him that she kept her balcony door open during the night while she was sleeping. She said that, during one of her conversations with the defendant prior to the rape, he told her that he lived in apartment 1011 with another person. Subsequently, when first interviewed, the defendant was in apartment 1011. The victim lived in apartment 1001.

During direct examination, the victim testified that she had picked out a photograph of the man who attacked her, first saying, “That’s the one I picked out and signed my name under it,” and then explaining that she “[m]ight not have been positive but that’s the one I picked out.” When asked, during her trial testimony, whether the man who raped her was in the courtroom, she identified the defendant, saying, “He’s sitting over there. I saw him when he came in.” She also identified the defendant’s black and white tennis shoes as being like those worn by her attacker. During cross-examination, the victim was asked if, apparently during the preliminary hearing, she had identified another man in the General Sessions courtroom as her attacker and appeared to deny that she had done so. However, Judge Tim Dwyer, of the Shelby County General Sessions Criminal Court, testifying as a defense witness, recalled that the victim, in her wheelchair, had testified during the preliminary hearing and had identified another man as her attacker.

Michael Carl Davis, who was the janitor and also a resident of the same apartment building where the victim lived, testified that he lived in apartment 1101, which was directly above the victim’s apartment. He said that on the morning the victim was attacked, he was awakened just before 4 a.m. when a man, whom he identified as the defendant, came into his apartment. When Davis asked the defendant why he was there, the defendant replied, “I was just hollering at you.” Davis recognized the defendant as having been in the building on previous occasions trying to get residents to let him cut their hair. He said that he was shown a series of photographs either later that day or the following day, and identified the photograph of the defendant as the man who had earlier asked to cut his hair and who had entered his apartment the morning of the rape.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
76 S.W.3d 352, 2001 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 791, 2001 WL 1150309, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-dean-tenncrimapp-2001.