Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals hears challenge to admission of recorded pretrial statements in Aspen Chapman murder case

NASHVILLE — At its January session in Nashville, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals heard oral arguments in State of Tennessee v. Aspen Chapman over whether recorded pretrial statements from two witnesses should have been admitted at trial and whether the record supports a first-degree premeditated murder conviction.

Defense attorney Ben Russ told the three-judge panel that the State used pretrial recordings of Latronea and Messiah Howard to obtain a conviction despite the sisters’ trial testimony that they did not remember making those statements. "The state's attorney was clearly in the know that the Howards were gonna take this position at trial," Russ said, arguing that Tennessee Rule of Evidence 607 remains “good law” and conflicts with the narrower-substance admission in Rule 803(26).

The issue is central to the defense’s claim because, Russ said, the only substantive evidence placing Aspen Chapman at the shooting was the Howard cousins’ pretrial statements and a firearm and a shell casing linked by forensic testing to a gun found at Chapman’s home. He told the court the pretrial statements were made in 2018, the case did not go to trial until 2022, and that the sisters initially…