Michigan v. Smith (Opinion - Leave Granted)
Annotate this CaseDefendant Feronda Smith was charged with, among other things, armed robbery and first-degree felony murder after the police found known drug dealer Larry Pass, Jr., dead in Pass’s own home. At trial, two prosecution witnesses claimed to have been present when defendant allegedly shot Pass. The first witness was codefendant Tarence Lard, who testified for the prosecution as part of a plea agreement for his part in the crime. The second witness was Mark Yancy, who maintained his innocence with respect to the shooting but admitted collecting Pass’s drugs, helping dispose of the murder weapon, and using cocaine with defendant and Lard after the shooting. Yancy and Lard contradicted one another in important ways, although both testified that Yancy and defendant had had a violent dispute over money in the weeks leading up to the murder. No other evidence connected defendant to the crime or confirmed that he had ever been at the scene, and no murder weapon was ever recovered. Yancy was a paid informant, and had been compensated for his assistance in a FBI inquiry into Pass' murder. The issue this case presented for the Michigan Supreme Court's review centered on whether the prosecution breached a duty to correct the substantially misleading, if not false, testimony of Yancy's about his formal and compensated cooperation in the government’s investigation. "Given the overall weakness of the evidence against the defendant and the significance of the witness’s testimony," the Supreme Court concluded that there was a reasonable probability that the prosecution’s exploitation of the substantially misleading testimony affected the verdict. Therefore the Court reversed and remanded this case for a new trial.
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