The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted relief to Brenda Andrew, who was sentenced to death in Oklahoma after prosecutors introduced evidence about her sex life and her failings as a wife and mother. The Court ordered the federal appeals court to assess whether this “irrelevant evidence about [her] demeanor as a woman … deprive[d] her of a fundamentally fair trial.”
Brenda Andrew was convicted of capital murder after her husband was fatally shot in 2001. Ms. Andrew, who was shot in the arm during the incident, told police that two armed men committed the shooting. She explained that she and her husband were separated, and she was dating James Pavatt. He eventually confessed to committing the shooting with a friend and denied that Ms. Andrew was involved.
The State accused Ms. Andrew of conspiring with Mr. Pavatt to murder her husband. At trial, according to the Court’s per curiam decision, the prosecution “elicited testimony about Andrew’s sexual partners reaching back two decades; about the outfits she wore to dinner or during grocery runs; about the underwear she packed for vacation; and about how often she had sex in her car.” The prosecutor also displayed her thong underwear to jurors while urging them to convict her of capital murder.
Ms. Andrew was convicted and sentenced to death. On appeal, she argued that irrelevant evidence about extramarital affairs and how she dressed rendered her trial fundamentally unfair in violation of due process.
Even though the State agreed that most of the evidence was irrelevant—a dissenting judge wrote it had “no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman”—the state court denied relief.
Ms. Andrew sought relief in federal court, which may grant relief only if it finds the state court unreasonably applied “clearly established” Supreme Court precedent. Ms. Andrew argued the state court decision violated Payne v. Tennessee, a 1991 decision in which the Supreme Court made clear that the Due Process Clause provides relief when “evidence is introduced that is so unduly prejudicial that it renders the trial fundamentally unfair.”
But a divided Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Payne did not qualify as clearly established precedent. As a result, it refused to even consider how the jury was prejudiced against her when, as the dissent put it, the State portrayed her “as a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel, sparking distrust based on her loose morals [and] plucking away any realistic chance that the jury would seriously consider her version of events.”
“That was wrong,” the Supreme Court wrote, explaining that in Payne and other decisions, the Court had made clear that “due process protects defendants from the introduction of evidence so prejudicial as to affect the fundamental fairness of their trials.”
Because the Tenth Circuit erroneously failed to recognize Payne as clearly established federal law, the Court summarily reversed. It remanded the case for the circuit court to evaluate whether—at the guilt or sentencing phase—“the trial court’s mistaken admission of irrelevant evidence was so ‘unduly prejudicial’ as to render her trial ‘fundamentally unfair.’”
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented.