Judge redacted victim’s biological sex so the appeals court overturned manslaughter conviction

THE DAILY BS: HOW MUCH CAN YOU HANDLE?

SPARE ME THE BS (I’ve got things to do).

A Tennessee appeals court reversed Samuel Ward Jr.’s voluntary manslaughter conviction because the trial judge excluded evidence about the victim’s biological sex.
Ward argued the excluded information mattered to his self-defense claim in the shooting of Paris Lee.
The October 5 ruling orders a new trial; it does not declare Ward innocent or establish that the shooting was justified.

LAY IT ON ME (I’ve got time).

A Tennessee judge kept a victim’s biological sex from a manslaughter jury, allowed autopsy evidence to be redacted and restricted what the defendant could say about the person he shot.

Now an appeals court has thrown out the conviction.

Samuel Ward Jr. was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the June 29, 2022, shooting death of Paris Lee, a transgender woman. Ward admitted the shooting but maintained that he acted in self-defense.

Before trial, prosecutors asked the judge to prohibit references to Lee’s biological sex. The defense argued that the information was relevant to the circumstances of the confrontation.

Ward told the court: “I would like to testify if I could tell the whole truth.”

He ultimately did not testify, and a jury convicted him.

On October 5, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction, concluding that the lower court had improperly excluded relevant evidence.

The appeals court did not rule that Lee’s biological sex automatically justified anything Ward did. It ruled that the trial court’s handling of the evidence was legally erroneous.

Ward already knew Lee’s sex before the fatal encounter. This was not a case involving a sudden discovery. The question was whether the jury should have been permitted to hear evidence relevant to the defense’s account. Ward faces another trial. The prosecution can still seek a conviction, and the defense must still establish its arguments.

But this time the jurors won’t be asked to reach their verdict under the same evidentiary restrictions. It’s a rather fundamental idea: Let the jury hear the relevant facts before asking it to decide what happened.