The Mississippi Court of Appeals upheld Dennis Thompson’s 2014 conviction for murder and three aggravated assault charges on Tuesday.
Lawyers representing Thompson unsuccessfully argued a recorded police interview should not have been allowed on the record as evidence and that the lower court erred in refusing to allow specific jury instructions on the concept of reasonable doubt.
Thompson was arrested in 2010 after he fired a weapon into a crowd about six times following an altercation near the intersection of Highway 182 and North Washington Street. Curtis K. “C.K.” Randle, 25, was killed, while three others were injured in the shooting.
Thompson was found guilty of murder in 2014 and sentenced to 30 years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He also received five-year prison sentences for each of the three aggravated assault charges, with two of the sentences to run consecutively to one another and to the murder sentence, and one five-year sentence to run concurrently to the murder sentence.
After Thompson’s lawyers argued the shooting occurred in self-defense, and other witnesses testified they did not see him with a gun and that there may have been a different shooter at the scene, the state attempted to introduce as rebuttal evidence a taped interview of Thompson former Starkville Police Department Det. Landon Stamps conducted.
In the interview, Thompson admitted to firing a .40-caliber handgun about six times before leaving the scene.
His lawyers objected to Stamps’ testimony and the interview’s admissibility during the trial but later withdrew their opposition as they, along with Coleman and the prosecution, viewed the video outside of the jury’s presence.
The appeal again charged Coleman should not have allowed the video to be introduced as rebuttal evidence through Stamps’ testimony.
“In fact, both of his attorneys expressly stated that they wanted the jury to hear the interview. Accordingly, Thompson waived any objection to the videotaped interview,” the majority opinion of the appeal decision states. “In any event, the trial judge did not abuse his discretion by allowing Stamps to testify in rebuttal.”
Thompson’s appeal also argues Coleman erred by refusing all 15 of his counsel’s jury instructions, even though lawyers only provided supporting arguments for three of those instructions and, in oral arguments before the appeals court, “voluntarily conceded that the denial” of one of the instructions “was not a reversible error, as it was fairly covered elsewhere in the jury instructions.”
In one of the instructions in question, his lawyers attempted to acutely define reasonable doubt.
Chief Judge L. Joseph Lee, Presiding Judge T. Kenneth Griffis, Judge Eugene L. Fair Jr., Judge Jim M. Greenlee and Judge David M. Ishee concurred on the majority opinion, while a dissent penned by Judge Virginia C. Carlton was joined by Presiding Judge Tyree Irving and Judge Donna M. Barnes. Judge Latrice Westbrooks did not participate.
Thompson, who was 18 at the time of the 2010 shooting, was also indicted in 2013 for aggravated assault after he allegedly shot a victim one year earlier in a Louisville Street trailer park.
The case was continued in January as Thompson’s lawyer awaited the outcome of his murder conviction’s appeal. Thompson is due back in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court for the aggravated assault charge in April.
Carl Smith covers Starkville and Oktibbeha County for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @StarkDispatch
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