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Smith v. State12/22/2000
numerous witnesses, thus making the evidence in the excluded records cumulative. The appellant's sister testified at the sentencing hearing about the home and family life of the appellant. Thus, if error occurred, at all, it was harmless. See Ala.R.App.P. 45; McMahon v. State, 560 So. 2d 1094 (Ala.Cr.App. 1989)." 686 So. 2d at 444.
Contrary to the prosecutor's argument, Knotts is not authority for excluding any and all evidence relating to an immediate family member of a capital defendant. The ruling in Knotts was clearly limited: the court in that case found that "the trial court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to allow admission [of the records] under the facts and circumstances existing here." 686 So. 2d at 444 (emphasis added). Evidence relating to another person and not directly to the defendant may be relevant to show a capital defendant's disadvantaged background or his emotional or mental problems. See, e.g., Price v. State, 725 So. 2d 1003, 1062 (Ala. Crim. App. 1997) (the trial court correctly found the existence of the non-statutory mitigating circumstance that the defendant's father was murdered when the defendant was a small child), aff'd, 725 So. 2d 1063 (Ala. 1998); Guthrie v. State, 689 So. 2d 948, 950 (Ala. Crim. App. 1996), aff'd, 689 So. 2d 951 (Ala. 1997) (the trial court found and considered, as non-statutory mitigation, that one of the defendant's siblings had died from a gunshot wound and another had been killed in an automobile accident). See also Abdur' Rahman v. Bell, 999 F.Supp. 1073, 1098 (M.D. Tenn. 1998) (in discussing mitigation evidence, the court noted: "Petitioner also had a family history of serious mental conditions. Petitioner's sister ... attempted suicide on multiple occasions and was institutionalized several times for mental health problems. ... Petitioner's brother ... committed suicide while this case was pending...."), vacated on other ground, 226 F. 3d 696 (6th Cir. 2000). Cf. Roberts v. State, 735 So. 2d 1244 (Ala. Crim. App. 1997) (remanded for a new sentencing hearing, in part, because of the trial court's exclusion, on the basis of irrelevancy, of evidence regarding the personality of a person the appellant argued had substantial domination over him), aff'd, 735 So. 2d 1270 (Ala. 1999). Furthermore, what makes evidence of incidents involving people other than the defendant relevant to mitigation of the defendant's crime is the effect each incident had upon the defendant's life, see State v. Simpson, 341 N.C. 316, 462 S.E.2d 191 (1995), not necessarily who was involved. See, e.g., Doyle v. State, 460 So. 2d 353 (Fla. 1984) (the defendant was allowed to present evidence that he had suffered emotional disturbance as the result of the death of his brother in his arms after a hunting accident the previous year); State v. Richardson, 346 N.C. 520, 488 S.E.2d 148 (1997) (the jury found as mitigating evidence that, at an important stage in the defendant's development, the defendant's brother had been murdered, and that event resulted in significant changes in his personality and behavior). Succinctly, the relevancy of proposed evidence of mitigating circumstances cannot be determined merely by whether the evidence involved only the defendant; such a litmus test would be unconstitutional.
Clearly, the above principles cast serious doubt on the propriety of the trial court's blanket ruling that evidence relating "anything that happened to anybody other than the defendant" be excluded. However, we disagree with the appellant's assertions that the trial court "basically restricted the mitigation case to evidence of appellant's deficiencies" (appellant's brief, p. 33), and disallowed evidence that he "grew up in a markedly dysfunctional family" (appellant
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