State of Tennessee v. Andrew Thomas

Summary

The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed Andrew Thomas's first degree felony-murder conviction and death sentence for the 1997 shooting death of armored-truck guard James Day during a robbery in Memphis. The court held that the trial court properly excused a prospective juror for cause under the standard that death-penalty views may not prevent or substantially impair a juror's duties, that the failure to instruct on the lesser included offenses of felony murder was error but harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, and that the death sentence was not arbitrary, excessive, or disproportionate under comparative proportionality review. The Court adopted the Court of Criminal Appeals' disposition of the remaining issues, appended to the opinion, which had affirmed Thomas while reversing co-defendant Bond's conviction on the same instructional error. Justice Birch concurred in the affirmance of the conviction but dissented from the death sentence, contending the comparative proportionality protocol is inadequate; Judge Joe G. Riley of the Court of Criminal Appeals concurred in part and dissented in part only as to the harmlessness of the facilitation-of-felony-murder instruction failure as to Bond.