State of Tennessee, Appellee v. Andre S. Bland, Appellant

Summary

The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed Andre Bland's conviction of premeditated first degree murder and his sentence of death by electrocution, holding the evidence sufficient to establish premeditation, deliberation, and the especially-heinous-atrocious-or-cruel (torture) aggravating circumstance, and holding the sentence proportionate. For the first time the court announced a structured framework for statutory comparative proportionality review: it adopted the precedent-seeking method over statistical frequency analysis, confined the pool of similar cases to first-degree murders in which a capital sentencing hearing was actually held regardless of the sentence imposed, and enumerated non-exhaustive crime and defendant factors for comparison. Applying that framework, the court found the case consistent with six affirmed death-sentence cases and declined to invalidate the sentence as aberrant. Justices Reid and Birch concurred in part and dissented in part: Justice Reid agreed the evidence was sufficient but would find the death sentence disproportionate and remand for life imprisonment or life without parole, while Justice Birch shared that view and would enlarge the comparison pool to all Rule 12 first-degree murder convictions.