The Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a Texas man who argued that the prosecution’s use of a medical expert who had not performed an autopsy on the victim violated his constitutional rights.
The case of Jared Holton Seavey now returns to the Court of Appeals of Texas for the 14th District, which may order a retrial or take other action.
The nation’s highest court vacated the ruling of the Court of Appeals of Texas “for further consideration in light of Smith v. Arizona.”
The Supreme Court ruled on June 21 in that prior case that prosecutors infringed on an Arizona defendant’s constitutional right to confront witnesses against him by using the testimony of a substitute expert witness who had not conducted the drug tests performed by another expert.
In 2019, Seavey was indicted for the murder of his fiancée, Vanessa Mayfield, by beating her to death with his foot, according to court papers.
Dr. Susan Roe, a deputy medical examiner, carried out the autopsy on the victim’s body. Before the trial, the state indicated that it planned to call Dr. Richard Fries, another deputy medical examiner, to the witness stand to testify about the cause of death.
The state-level trial court held a pretrial hearing to ascertain the admissibility of Fries’s testimony about the cause of death. He said he formed an opinion as to the cause based on his reading of Roe’s autopsy report and photographs from the autopsy. Fries said that in his opinion, the victim died as a result of traumatic injuries sustained to the head and neck.
Seavey objected to the admission of Fries’s expert opinion based on the U.S. Constitution’s confrontation clause, which guarantees an accused person the right to question those giving evidence against him. He argued that only Roe was competent to give evidence as to the cause of death. The court overruled the objection and found Fries’s testimony admissible.
The jury convicted Seavey, and he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
The appeals court said that Fries “acted as more than a mere surrogate for Dr. Roe’s autopsy report ... [and] did not blindly recite Dr. Roe’s findings.” His testimony “was based on his independent analysis” of the medical evidence.
Because he “did not act as a mere surrogate, and offered his independent opinions, his testimony was permissible.”
“But Fries admitted that ‘aside from what she described in the autopsy report,’ he ‘did not know any technique or method [Roe] used to conduct the autopsy,‘” the petition reads. “He also said that ’if there was some kind of mistake' in carrying out the autopsy, he would not know about it.”
Fries testified that death resulted from “traumatic injuries to the head and neck,” but Seavey argued in the petition that such an opinion could not have been arrived at “merely by observing autopsy photos of the exterior, which seemed to show merely scrapes and abrasions.”
The detective who investigated the case said at trial that the cause of death “could not have been determined based on mere examination of the body.”
The medical examiner would have to remove part of the skull to look at the brain.
“Fries did not do that; he had to rely on Roe’s examination,” the petition reads.
The record shows that “Dr. Fries’s testimony was confined to his own independently formed opinion based primarily on the photographs of the autopsy that had been authenticated at trial by the technician who took those photographs,” Grady wrote.
The Smith v. Arizona precedent doesn’t apply to this case because Roe’s autopsy report “was not admitted at trial,” which means the Constitution’s confrontation clause is not implicated by the evidence used at trial, she said.
“Nor is it true that Dr. Fries’s opinion was the only evidence of cause of death,“ she wrote. ”By the time Dr. Fries took the stand at trial, the cause of death was already amply proved by the crime scene photographs and Seavey’s videotaped confession.”
“And there is no evidence that after Seavey inflicted her injuries, Mayfield died from some other intervening cause,” Grady wrote.
Lawyers representing both sides declined to weigh in on the ruling.
“I have no comment at this time,” Seavey’s attorney, William Biggs of Fort Worth, Texas, told The Epoch Times.
Anna Tinsley Williams, communications officer for Grady’s office, said by email, “We don’t comment on pending cases.”
