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State v. Payne11/20/2002
g Eric Rogers around a car. At the same time, the defendant ran up, grabbed the victim, and slung him facedown onto his stomach with his hands out to his sides. The defendant told the victim to give him his money. The victim replied that he did not have any, and was "pulling his pockets out trying to show him he didn't have money" when the defendant "all of a sudden" shot him. The victim said, "I ain't got no money, don't shoot me." The defendant shot him again. The victim said, "Please don't kill me." The defendant then shot him again. During the shooting, Brown asked the defendant what he was doing and told him not to shoot or kill the victim.
Two days after the shooting, he identified the defendant from a photographic lineup as the victim's shooter. Phillips also made a positive courtroom identification of the defendant as the shooter. He testified that the defendant had two guns at the time of the shooting, and that he had also seen the weapons earlier that day when the defendant was " lashing them around." As far as he knew, the victim did not have a weapon. On cross-examination, Phillips acknowledged that the victim and Rogers were both friends of his, and conceded that the defendant "probably" was "strung on crack cocaine" that night. He insisted, however, that he knew nothing about any drug activity on the street.
Officer Cham Payne of the Memphis Police Department Crime Response Unit testified that he and his partner received a call about the shooting at 6:45 p.m. When they arrived at the scene, 1185 and 1187 Aubra, which was a duplex, they found the victim lying on his back on the front porch in front of the door to 1185. Sergeant Thomas Helldorfer, a homicide investigator with the Memphis Police Department, testified that, as part of his investigation of the crime, he searched for the defendant at various locations, including the Aubra neighborhood and his grandmother's house on New York, but was unable to find him.
Defense Proof
The first defense witness was Steven Paul Rossby, Ph.D., a molecular neurobiologist on the faculty of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, who was allowed to offer expert testimony on serotonin and its relationship to human behavior. Dr. Rossby testified that serotonin is one of a number of naturally occurring chemicals in the brain known as neurotransmitters, which fall into one of two categories: excitatory neurotransmitters, or chemicals that cause the nerve cells to fire impulses, and inhibitory neurotransmitters, or chemicals that inhibit or prevent the nerve cells from firing. Serotonin, which acts to inhibit the firing of nerve impulses, has been the subject of extensive research for over twenty years because it appears not only to be an inhibitory neurotransmitter, but also to control or orchestrate other inhibitory systems in the brain. Dr. Rossby explained that the various inhibitory systems in the human brain have evolved
so that we don't act on every impulse, so that we may get angry but we don't go beyond it, we control our anger, or we -- we don't respond to everything that's happening impulsively, that we -- we have a chance -- we have some control within the limbic system. This has evolved over -- I don't know how many millions of years these systems have evolved to protect us from just acting purely impulsively.
Dr. Rossby testified that the research in the field has consistently shown a link between low serotonin levels and "explosive impulsive violence." In addition, scientists have discovered that Type II alcoholism and intermittent explosive disorder are both linked to low levels of serotonin. He described a Type II alcoholic as "the mean drunk," " he person who has a couple of
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