Gunfight on Locust Street in Knoxville 1916:

At 10:25 p.m. on Monday, July 3, 1916, shots were fired on the block of Locust Street between Cumberland Avenue and Main Avenue in Knoxville. The shooters were Gideon Rush Strong and Samuel Bell Luttrell Jr. Why? Because Rush's wife Bonnie Hurt Strong told her husband that Sam had raped her twice, once by dope and once by force. Let's review the bios of the trio. Rush Strong (age 29 on gunfight night) was son of a wealthy farmer living 10 miles northeast of Knoxville on the Rutledge Pike.

This book exonerates the three falsely accused Duke lacrosse players. It indicts and convicts three guilty parties:

1. Prosecutor Mike Nifong, now disbarred;
2. The "Group" (Gang?) of 88, airhead malicious faculty members; and
3. The New York Times, the newspaper joke of record.

Read Nader Baydoun's book, reviewed by Wade Davies in this issue. Read this book for additional details.

In Lenoir City on Nov. 6, 1961, June Newberry shot Ann Gowder in the left temple as the latter arrived for work. Why? Because Ann had stolen June's husband Raymond and taunted her about the theft.

It would be a hard case to defend. The state sought the death penalty. June's lead Loudon County counsel sought assistance from legendary Ray Jenkins, the "Terror of Tellico Plains."

Here's the traditional version. Hiram Hall, age 18, of Cumberland County murdered his younger wife Ida by hitting her head with a rock and dropping her into a well on the family farm on Aug. 18, 1897. He was tried Aug. 26 through 28, 1898, convicted, and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court affirmed Jan. 28, 1899. He was hanged at 6:53 a.m. on Thursday, April 13, 1899. Hiram's April 12 confession before execution blamed his mother for ordering the murder. Apparently mom hated her daughter-in-law. The declaration reported in the Crossville Chronicle contained these facts:

By Nader Baydoun and R. Stephanie Good | Thomas Nelson Inc. | $25.99 | 260 pages | 2007

Nashville lawyer and Duke alumnus Nader Baydoun was so puzzled by what he was hearing about the treatment of the accused Duke lacrosse players that he returned to Duke, did his own investigation, and wrote a book about the case.

In A Rush to Injustice, coauthored by New York attorney and writer Stephanie Good, Baydoun uses his training as a trial lawyer to analyze the available evidence and detail the ways in which the players were publicly dragged through the mud when it should have been clear from the outset that the case should not have been prosecuted.

Although his is not the only book on the subject, TBA members will find his account interesting because, as a lawyer, Baydoun was able to get cooperation and assistance from a number of the lawyers and paralegals who prepared the defense. He was given access to defense material, including a detailed timeline developed to show that some of the accused were not even at the party at the time of the alleged assault. Baydoun's insight into defense strategy makes the book worth reading. For example, when all 46 members of the lacrosse team were ordered to appear at the DNA lab, they hid their faces from the cameras. While normally clients are instructed never to appear to hide, in this case they were specifically instructed to do so because counsel feared that the accuser would be shown the television footage as part of a suggestive identification procedure. (It turns out those fears were well founded.) Baydoun details how the case was handled by skilled lawyers with the resources to track down cell phone records, camera phone evidence, and ultimately the exculpatory DNA reports that were initially withheld from the defense.

Baydoun does an excellent job of setting out the excesses of elected District Attorney Mike Nifong, including: (1) making false and damning statements about the evidence when he had never even met the accuser, (2) representing to the court that an order for DNA testing was necessary because it would "immediately rule out innocent persons" and then taking the position that the exculpatory DNA results that showed the genetic material of multiple males, none of whom had anything to do with the lacrosse party, were irrelevant and having it removed from the report, (3) manipulation of identification procedures, and (4) refusal even to meet with defense counsel to consider defense evidence.

Baydoun also does a good job undermining Nifong's defense of his own actions. Baydoun's interpretation of the problem, however, is that the travesty was the result of a bad person being in authority and that the system should "purge itself of individuals in positions of authority who commit outrageous acts of misconduct, and severely punish those people who commit these acts." Here he misses the chance to evaluate whether there are systemic problems with the fact that there is no real oversight of the prosecution's obligations to present exculpatory evidence. He does not ask why Nifong was able to make the argument that the rules do not specify when exculpatory evidence must be disclosed, so he did not violate any rules by having the exculpatory sections excised from the DNA report. Baydoun also seems to spend an excessive amount of time setting out his theories that the lacrosse players were treated unfairly because of their class and race without examining the more important question of how often things like this happen to people who do not have access to outstanding lawyers who dig deep enough to expose the truth.

As a Duke alumnus, Baydoun was deeply offended by the actions of the Duke administration in failing to support the players, but the sections of the book dealing with the university will probably be much less interesting to the legal community than his description of the available evidence and the way the case was handled by both sides.

By Harold Schechter | Ballantine Books | $27.95 | 494 pages | 2007

You and I know about the evidence principle that other crimes are inadmissible in an accused's trial for the indicted crime. It is ensconced in Rule 404(b).

A famous case applying that principle is People v. Molineux, 61 N.E. 286 (N.Y. 1901). You may have read excerpts in a casebook during your law school days.

By Clarence Thomas | Harper Collins | $26.95 | 289 pages | 2007

This is the autobiography of Justice Clarence Thomas from his birth in Pinpoint, Georgia, through his swearing in at the United States

Supreme Court. It is a moving book, a memoir dedicated to his maternal grandfather Myers Anderson. Mr. Anderson ("Daddy") and wife raised the future justice and his brother in Savannah.

Few of us could have accomplished so much in face of the poverty and discrimination he endured. His life is a testament to hard work and determination.

One of the things I admire about the book is the author's candor about his shortcomings. Included among those was his fondness for alcohol. That ended on a hungover morning when he opened the refrigerator for food and found only two cans of Busch beer. "I drew myself a hot bath and downed them slowly as I sat in it. I haven't had a drink since."

He gives his side of the Anita Hill controversy. It is a welcome counterpoint to the vituperation heaped upon the nominee in those days.

I recommend the audio version; Justice Thomas is the reader. The hardbound book version is interesting because of 16 pages of photographs. Either way, it's a good read. �

Charles Edward Hartman died in prison at age 49 on May 24, 2007. Good riddance. Had he never existed, Kathy Nishiyama might have enjoyed a fulfilling existence. But on Nov. 16-17, 1981, he kidnapped the 16-year-old and raped, murdered, then raped her again.

Who was this fiend? Three Supreme Court opinions tell the tale at 703 S.W.2d 106 (1985), 896 S.W.2d 94 (1995), and 42 S.W.3d 44 (2001).

Dying Declarations

On Friday, July 13, 2001, Sabrina Lewis drove a killer to Always Antiques to rob and murder the proprietor, Gary Dean Finchum. She was convicted and sentenced to 21 years.

Sabrina had been casing the store for three weeks under the ruse of wanting to sell two vases. On the fatal morning she left identifying information: her name and a driver's license number and "two vases."

The dying Mr. Finchum spoke to Detective Mike Chastain:

I had thought that ax murders went out of fashion after Lizzie Borden's 1893 parricides in Massachusetts. But they surfaced again in Memphis around 4:30 a.m. on Monday, May 2, 1932. At 1300 Ridgeway (near the intersection of present day Mississippi Boulevard and South Parkway), Stanley Puryear axed wife Aurelia and daughter Aurelia Zenia (age 8). Then he shotgunned a black man named Will Jamison. He told police that Jamison murdered the first two victims.

What was Puryear's motive? He had been committing adultery with Mary Sunshine Walker. She told him to get a divorce or she would leave him for another man. Aurelia Cucinotta Puryear was a devout Catholic who would never have consented to divorce.

Her murder was the macabre marriage dissolution. Little Aurelia Zenia slept in her mother's bedroom, so she also had to be slaughtered. Fortunately, son Porter (age 11) slept in the back bedroom with his father and escaped harm. Unfortunately, he always believed in the murderer's innocence.

Will Jamison made a dying declaration to police officers. He denied Puryear's accusation that he was the ax wielder. He declared the true story was that Puryear fetched him on Beale Street with an offer to pay for help carrying Prohibition liquor from the Ridgeway attic. He was left in the car (while Puryear killed wife and daughter), then Puryear shot him twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. This dying declaration was diametrically opposite from the story that Puryear was soon to tell from the witness stand.

Tennessee tried Stanley Allen Puryear four times. First he was tried for the murder of Will Jamison. The jury returned a verdict of acquittal on Oct. 19, 1932. Second he was tried for the murder of wife Aurelia. The jury could not agree and the judge declared a mistrial on Nov. 29, 1933.

The third trial is of most interest to me because I was able to obtain the bill of exceptions (today the transcript of evidence) from Ms. Darla Brock at the State Library and Archives. Again prosecuted for wife murder, Stanley Puryear stood trial Nov. 19-26, 1934. Sunshine Walker, the accused, his son and many others testified for the defense. But the jury returned a verdict of second degree murder.

Our Supreme Court reversed on April 4, 1936. Although the full opinion has "gone missing" (as the illiterati say and write), I found excerpts in a newspaper. Special Justice Davis wrote about Will Jamison's dying declaration:

A reading of the record convinces us that the police officers and the assistant attorney general developed the case upon the theory of [Will Jamison's] statements. The statements made by [Jamison] were not evidence as to their truth, and nothing he said carried any probative weight in the trial of Puryear for the murder of his wife.

The court was applying the common law hearsay exception for dying declarations, now embodied in Tennessee Rule of Evidence 804(b)(2):

The following are not excluded by the hearsay rule if the declarant is unavailable as a witness:

* * *

In a prosecution for homicide, a statement made by the victim while believing that the declarant's death was imminent and concerning the cause or circumstances of what the declarant believed to be impending death.

As the comment explains: "The trial must be for the homicide of the declarant." The third trial was for the homicide of victim Aurelia Puryear, not for the homicide of victim Will Jamison, the declarant.

The federal exception for dying declarations does not contain this Tennessee limitation. Should our version be amended to allow admissibility in a murder prosecution for a victim other than the declarant? Perhaps so. After all, the trustworthiness of this hearsay exception is grounded in the historical belief that a person would not tell a lie in the fast lane to the hereafter. If Will Jamison's dying words were true in the trial for his murder, they were no less true in the trial for Aurelia Puryear's murder.

The State returned to the courtroom a fourth time. On June 28, 1937, 12 jurors convicted Stanley Puryear of second degree murder and set the sentence at 20 years. The Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Justice Cook reported at 174 Tenn. 291, 125 S.W.2d 138 (March 4, 1939). Because of a technicality under the arcane terms of court statutes of the day, the bill of exceptions was untimely filed and a motion to strike was granted. But the court nonetheless read the transcript:

We have examined all of the evidence and, although it raises some doubt of the defendant's guilt, it could not be found that the evidence which is conflicting upon all issues preponderates against the verdict.

Stanley Puryear reported to the penitentiary in Nashville on April 21, 1939. He died there of a heart ailment at age 47 on Nov. 2, 1941.

Will Jamison's remains lie at New Park Cemetery in South Memphis. Records do not exist prior to the 1960s. Consequently I cannot ascertain the location of his grave or whether it has a tombstone.

A telephone call to Memorial Park Cemetery in East Memphis on Poplar at Interstate 240 produced burial records and maps. In Section H of the cemetery are four markers, one each for: Aurelia C. Puryear (d. May 2, 1932), Aurelia Z. Puryear (d. May 2, 1932), Stanley A. Puryear (d. November 2, 1941), and Porter Puryear (d. July 19, 2003). I dare not speculate how that arrangement got worked out in heaven or purgatory or hell.

DONALD F. PAINE is a past president of the Tennessee Bar Association and is of counsel to the Knoxville firm of Paine, Tarwater, Bickers, and Tillman LLP. He lectures for the Tennessee Law Institute, BAR/BRI Bar Review, Tennessee Judicial Conference, and UT College of Law. He is reporter to the Supreme Court Advisory Commission on Rules of Practice and Procedure.