State v. Jackson
| Decision Date | 22 August 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. W2009–01709–SC–R11–CD.,W2009–01709–SC–R11–CD. |
| Parties | STATE of Tennessee v. Noura JACKSON. |
| Court | Tennessee Supreme Court |
Valerie T. Corder, (on appeal and at trial), and Arthur Quinn (at trial), Memphis, Tennessee, for the appellant, Noura Jackson.
Robert E. Cooper, Jr., Attorney General and Reporter; William E. Young, Solicitor General; J. Ross Dyer, Senior Counsel; William L. Gibbons, District Attorney General; and Amy P. Weirich and Stephen P. Jones, Assistant District Attorneys General, for the appellee, State of Tennessee.
The defendant was charged with the June 2005 first degree premeditated murder of her mother. The jury convicted her of second degree murder after a trial in which the evidence was entirely circumstantial. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed her conviction and sentence, although the judges on the Panel were not unanimous as to the rationale for the decision. We granted the defendant's application for permission to appeal. We hold that the lead prosecutor's remark during final closing argument at trial amounted to a constitutionally impermissible comment upon the defendant's exercise of her state and federal constitutional right to remain silent and not testify. We also hold that the prosecution violated the defendant's constitutional right to due process by failing to turn over until after trial the third statement a key witness gave to law enforcement officers investigating the murder. The State has failed to establish that these constitutional errors were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, we vacate the defendant's conviction and sentence and remand for a new trial.
Noura Jackson (“Defendant”) was charged with the June 2005 first degree premeditated murder of her mother, Jennifer Jackson (“victim”). At Defendant's two-week trial in 2009, the prosecution called forty-five witnesses, and three hundred and seventy-six exhibits were introduced. The prosecution's theory at trial was that Defendant's motives for committing the crime were to gain control of the property belonging to Nazmi Hassanieh, her recently deceased father, which was in her mother's possession, and to obtain the proceeds of the victim's life insurance policy and 401(k) account so that she could continue partying and using illegal drugs with her friends—a lifestyle which her mother disapproved of and was taking steps to curtail or end. Defendant did not confess to the crime, and no forensic proof implicated her. The prosecution's case consisted entirely of circumstantial evidence.
Defendant maintained her innocence and exercised her constitutional right to remain silent and not testify at trial. At the close of the prosecution's case, the defense rested without calling any witnesses. The defense attorneys vigorously cross-examined prosecution witnesses, seeking to: (1) impeach their credibility; (2) create reasonable doubt about Defendant's guilt; (3) highlight evidence suggesting that someone else, and perhaps more than one person, committed the murder; and (4) attack the effectiveness of the methods the police used to process the crime scene and the thoroughness of the police investigation of other suspects.
At the conclusion of the trial, the sequestered jury convicted Defendant of the lesser-included offense of second degree murder, and the trial judge later sentenced her to twenty years and nine months. What follows is a more detailed summary of the proof presented at trial.1 Additional facts presented during the hearing on the motion for a new trial, in connection with Defendant's dispositive claims that the prosecution impermissibly commented upon her federal and state constitutional right to remain silent during final closing argument and deprived her of Due Process by failing to disclose a witness statement before trial or after the witness testified, will be provided in the discussion of those issues.
In June 2005, Defendant, eighteen and working on her high school degree,2 lived alone with the thirty-nine-year-old victim at 5001 Newhaven Drive in Memphis. The victim had divorced Defendant's father, Nazmi Hassanieh, when Defendant was an infant. In January 2004, Mr. Hassanieh was murdered during a robbery of the convenience store he owned. After his death, the victim attained property belonging to Mr. Hassanieh, which consisted primarily of several cars that the victim and Defendant both drove, many of which were parked in the driveway of the victim's home.3
The proof at trial showed that around midday on Saturday, June 4, 2005, the victim called Mark Irvin, her on-and-off again boyfriend since 2003, asking if she could attend church with him the next day and take him out for his birthday. Mr. Irvin declined. Mr. Irvin testified that the conversation ended on good terms, even though the victim seemed “disappointed.”
At 5:30 p.m. on June 4th, the victim drove to the home of a friend, Jimmy Tual, and the two attended a wedding and reception together in downtown Memphis. Mr. Tual testified that the victim ate and drank alcohol but was not intoxicated. After the reception, Mr. Tual drove them to a bar, the Cockeyed Camel, where each paid for a drink. The victim's credit card statement, introduced at trial, reflected that her card was used there at 11:06 p.m. and was not used again. Mr. Tual then drove the victim back to her car at his house, and she left his house at 11:30 p.m., stating that she was going home.4 Mr. Irvin, following up on their conversation of earlier that day, attempted to call the victim on her cell phone around midnight, but hung up before she answered.
The victim's body was discovered in her home shortly before 5:00 a.m. the next morning, Sunday, June 5, 2005. Joe and Rachel Cocke, who lived across the street with Mr. Cocke's mother, Sheila Cocke, were awakened by Defendant banging on their door and screaming, Believing a break-in was in progress, Mr. Cocke grabbed a pistol and ran across the street, with Defendant close behind him. When Mr. Cocke paused before entering the house, Defendant passed him and entered the house first, proceeding to the sunroom at the back of the house, where she called 911. Mr. Cocke looked throughout the house, but did not see any intruders. He asked Defendant where her mother was, and Defendant replied, Mr. Cocke then walked down the hallway where the bedrooms were located, looked into the victim's bedroom, and saw her “laying on the ground,” “naked,” “with blood all over her.” Mr. Cocke then ran back to his house in order to bring back his wife Rachel, who had also called 911 and was speaking to the operator on her home phone when Mr. Cocke returned. At that point, Mrs. Cocke gave the telephone to her mother-in-law to complete the call and went to the victim's home.
Defendant had remained in her home when Mr. Cocke left, and when Mrs. Cocke entered the house, she found Defendant in the sunroom still speaking with 911, “all curled up,” and “rocking and wailing” on the floor. Mr. Cocke stood in the front foyer, where he observed bloody shoe prints and drops of blood on the kitchen floor directly adjacent to where he stood and saw that the window on the kitchen door had been broken. Mrs. Cocke, who had taken the phone from Defendant, returned to the victim's bedroom at the direction of the 911 operator to see if the victim could be revived. Mrs. Cocke found the victim's bedroom by following the “bloody footprints in the hallway.” Mrs. Cocke saw “a lot of blood” and quickly realized that the victim was dead, explaining that “[t]he look on her face was fixed and it—and dead.” Mrs. Cocke did not touch the victim, and on the recording of the 911 call placed from Defendant's home, which was played for the jury and introduced as an exhibit at trial, Mrs. Cocke can be heard calling out, apparently to someone else, “[D]on't touch anything.”
Meanwhile, Defendant was crying and “hysterical,” repeatedly asking Mr. and Mrs. Cocke, “[I]s she dead, is she dead?” Defendant then said, Mrs. Cocke did not notice any blood on Defendant. The Cockes stayed with Defendant until the police arrived at around 5:15 a.m.
Memphis Police Officer Russell Tankersley and his partner were the first to arrive at the crime scene. When he entered the house, Defendant came to the door, yelling that something was wrong with her mom. “She's in the back,” she said. He and his partner went inside and immediately saw blood on the hallway floor. As he walked down the hall toward the victim's bedroom, Officer Tankersley had to ask a third officer to remove Defendant, who was screaming, “my mom, my mom” as she attempted to run back into the bedroom.5 When Officer Tankersley looked into the victim's bedroom, he had to use a flashlight to see because it was “very dark” inside. After going only one or two feet into the room, the officers saw blood on the bed, blood “right there in the doorway,” and the victim lying on the floor in front of the bed. They then backed out of the room and checked the rest of the house. Officer Tankersley noted glass on the kitchen floor, by the door going to the garage. He exited out that door and checked the garage and all of the outside doors, which were locked. The officers then went back to their squad cars and waited for the Crime Scene unit to arrive. Despite the heat—the temperature was already about ninety to ninety-five degrees when he arrived—Officer Tankersley observed that Defendant was wearing a “blue jean miniskirt” and a “long-sleeved” “fleece” or “sweatshirt.”
Memphis Fire Department paramedics arrived next at the scene...
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