State of Tennessee, Plaintiff-Appellee v. Hugh W. Melson, Defendant-Appellant

Summary

The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed Hugh Melson's first-degree murder conviction and death sentence for the 1980 bludgeoning death of Barbara Lawrence on her husband's farm near Jackson. The court upheld the sufficiency of the circumstantial evidence, the warrantless arrest, the search warrant for Melson's truck (including its reliance on unnamed citizen informants), the admission of bloodstain-pattern, serological, hair-comparison and photographic evidence, and the denials of bail relief, hybrid representation, a continuance, and a change of venue. It also rejected all challenges to the Tennessee death penalty statute, TCA § 39-2404, finding the especially-heinous and prevention-of-arrest aggravating circumstances supported and the sentence neither arbitrary nor capricious. Justice Brock concurred in part and dissented in part, stating that for the reasons given in his dissent in State v. Dicks he would hold the death penalty unconstitutional.