State of Tennessee, Appellee v. Michael Dean Bush, Appellant

Summary

The court affirmed Bush's convictions for premeditated first-degree murder and first-degree burglary and his death sentence. It held that his initial police interview was noncustodial, that he validly waived his rights before the second interview, and that questioning ceased when he requested counsel. The court also upheld the sufficiency of the evidence, the admission of psychiatric rebuttal evidence, the refusal to instruct the jury on parole eligibility, the application of the arrest-avoidance aggravator, and the harmlessness of the erroneous aggravator instruction. Chief Justice Birch, dissenting, would have vacated the death sentence for insufficient proof of the arrest-avoidance aggravator; Justice Reid, concurring, agreed with affirmance but separately criticized comparative proportionality review and discussed the aggravator-instruction error.