Legal Update

LEGAL UPDATE By: Allison R. Cyrus-Walker, Esq.

Law Office of Sheridan Randolph

BARNES v. STATE: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

On September 30, 2022, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals issued an opinion affirming the summary dismissal of Rhynuia L. Barnes’s petition for post-conviction relief.1 Barnes was convicted of first degree murder following a jury trial in 1999.2 Barnes’s requested relief was somewhat unique in its nature. Rhynuia Barnes submitted a motion pro se on December 13, 2021, seeking to have his dead father’s body exhumed for the purposes of obtaining a palm print to compare with an unidentified latent palm print on the murder weapon.3 Barnes’s father died in October 2002, almost twenty years prior.4 Barnes maintained, however, that if the unidentified palm print could be matched to his father, his innocence would be proven.5

The post-conviction court dismissed Barnes’s request for exhumation, citing that no basis had been established to demonstrate that exhuming his father’s body was requisite for the administration of justice. Barnes had filed three prior failed coram nobis petitions, and the postconviction court further noted that “overwhelming proof” was presented at trial of Barnes’s guilt.6 On February 16, 2022, Barnes filed another petition under the Post-Conviction Fingerprint Analysis Act of 2021, seeking fingerprint testing from his deceased father.7 It was this petition that led to the Court of Criminal Appeals’ recent opinion.

The Underlying Case

Barnes arrived at the victim’s home on September 2, 1997, brandishing a gun, and seeking to confront the victim over an alleged jewelry theft.8 Upon seeing the gun in Barnes’s hand, the victim fled to the rear area of the inside of the home. Testimony from the victim’s mother indicated that it wasn’t until after Barnes had run around to the back of the house, gun in hand, in pursuit of the victim that the older man (Barnes’s father) approached the front door.9 A neighbor testified to this as well, and both witnesses stated that they never saw the older man with a gun; only Barnes was carrying a gun.10 While the elder Barnes was at the front door, gun shots were heard from the back of the home where the younger Barnes had pursued the victim.11 The victim’s mother subsequently identified the gun she saw in Rhynuia Barnes’s hand as the murder weapon.12

When police officers initially encountered Barnes and his father after the shooting, the younger Barnes ran to a parked car from a house across the street from where the murder occurred.13 In the area that Barnes was witnessed by officers running from, investigating officers found a gun in a plastic bag with clothing, hidden in a pile of garbage.14 The gun recovered was a .38 revolver. The medical examiner testified that the victim died due to three gunshot wounds.15

Interestingly, Rhynuia’s father, James Barnes, had a bleeding cut on one of his hands when he was detained along with Rhynuia.16 Moreover, an officer found three live .38 shells in James Barnes’s pocket.17 Although the elder Barnes and his son were both suspects early on in the investigation, detectives stated that they did not fingerprint James Barnes because of his hand being bandaged.18 Once the charges against the father were dropped at his preliminary hearing, “it became impossible to obtain his prints.”19

The only print obtained from the murder weapon was the latent palm print that did not match the younger Barnes’s prints, and since the elder Barnes’s prints were not obtained in the initial investigation, they were never compared.20 At the police station following his arrest, Rhynuia Barnes confessed to the murder of Da’Shon Martin, telling police that his father had nothing to do with the shooting.21 When Barnes subsequently appealed his first degree murder conviction, he maintained that he confessed because he felt threatened by his father, and that his father was in fact the murderer.22

The Court of Criminal Appeals’ Analysis Under the Fingerprint Act

The Barnes case is one of a handful of cases that have come before Tennessee’s Criminal Court of Appeals seeking post-conviction relief under the Post-Conviction Fingerprint Analysis Act of 2021 (hereinafter, Fingerprint Act). A petition pursuant to the Fingerprint Act may seek performance of fingerprint analysis on any evidence in the possession of law enforcement, courts, or prosecution (among other state entities) “that is related to the investigation or prosecution that resulted in a judgment of conviction and that may contain fingerprint evidence.”23

Four elements under the statute must be satisfied for a court to order fingerprint analysis, including: (1) a showing of reasonable probability that the petitioner would not have been convicted if exculpating results had been procured through fingerprint analysis; (2) the evidence sought to be tested is still in existence and in a condition allowing fingerprint testing to be conducted; (3) either the evidence was not previously submitted for fingerprint analysis or was not subject to the analysis requested which could resolve a previously unresolved issue, or analysis that is significantly more probative than any previous analysis is being sought based on the availability of new technology or methods.24 The fourth element required is that the application for such relief be made for purposes of proving innocence only and not to delay the administration of justice.25

As demonstrated in Barnes, failure to meet any one of the four elements is fatal to an award of post-conviction relief under the Fingerprint Act.26 The Court of Criminal Appeals observed that elements one and two were the most problematic for Barnes’s petition.27 A latent fingerprint specialist had explained in detail at trial that the absence of the petitioner’s palm print on the murder weapon was not dispositive of the petitioner never handling the weapon, but that there were a number of reasons that explained how the younger Barnes could have handled the weapon without leaving a latent print.28 The most fatal issue in Barnes’s petition, however, was the fact that, even if the weapon was still in the state’s custody, there was absolutely no possibility of obtaining usable prints from James Barnes’s remains that had been decaying for over twenty years.29

The facts of cases like Barnes inevitably raise the specter of “what if…”, particularly in light of the vast forensic advancements over the last twenty years. Such cases involving pro se litigants like Barnes raise some especially vexing policy questions in view of the complex nature of postconviction relief under statutes like the Fingerprint Act. In the meantime, continued on page 23