Cases | Kemp v. State, 919 S.W.2d 943 (Ark. 1996) | 2018

The defendant was convicted of four counts of capital murder.  He appealed, arguing, among other things, that Arkansas’s victim-impact statute was void-for-vagueness because it failed to define “victim.”  The defendant argued further that, because there was no place in the Arkansas statutory weighing process for the jury to consider victim-impact evidence, Arkansas’s victim-impact statute violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Article 2, Section 9 of the Arkansas Constitution.  The Supreme Court of Arkansas affirmed the conviction and sentence pertaining to one victim, and affirmed the convictions only as to the remaining three counts.  The Court noted that it had rejected void-for-vagueness challenges similar to the defendant’s, finding that victim-impact testimony could be offered by a range of individuals, including the victim’s family and others who were close to the victim.  With respect to the defendant’s other arguments, the Court noted that victim-impact evidence is admissible unless it is so prejudicial as to make the trial fundamentally unfair.  The Court concluded that the victim-impact testimony offered at the defendant’s trial was not so unduly prejudicial as to render the trial fundamentally unfair.