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Chattanooga
September 16, 2015
The Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty for the man who kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered a woman in west Tennessee in 2010.
Rickey Alvis Bell, Jr. appealed his conviction and sentence after a trial court found him guilty of especially aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual battery, and two alternative counts of first-degree felony murder. The jury sentenced Bell to death for the first-degree murder conviction. The Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the convictions and sentence, despite finding that two of the four aggravating circumstances that warranted the death penalty were not supported by the record.
The Supreme Court, which is required to review all death penalty cases, also considered five other issues on appeal. The first issue was whether it was proper for the state to seek the death penalty in light of Bell’s possible intellectual disability. The court determined that the defense failed to prove that Bell suffered from an intellectual disability that would make him ineligible for the death penalty. The court also upheld the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law on this subject, concluding that defendants are permitted to present evidence of intellectual capacity in addition to I.Q. test scores, thereby avoiding constitutional issues.
