Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U.S. 451 (2001), was a U.S. Supreme Court case holding that there is no due process violation for lack of fair warning when pre-existing common law limitations on what acts constitute a crime, under a more broadly worded statutory criminal law, are broadened to include additional acts, even when there is no notice to the defendant that the court might undo the common law limitations, so long as the statutory criminal law was made prior to the acts, and so long as the expansion to the newly included acts is expected or defensible in reference to the statutory law. The court wrote, In the context of common law doctrines... Strict application of ex post facto principles... would unduly impair the incremental and reasoned development of precedent that is the foundation of the common law system." The decision did not affect the requirement of fair warning placed on statutes passed by legislatures - "The Constitution's Ex Post Facto Clause... 'is a limitation upon the powers of the Legislature, and does not of its own force apply to the Judicial Branch of government'... a judicial alteration of a common law doctrine of criminal law [only] violates the principal of fair warning... where it is 'unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue.
The case was about a murderer, Rogers, who stabbed his victim in the heart, causing the victim to have cardiac arrest and lapse into a coma. The victim was kept alive for fifteen months using modern medical methods. An ancient common law was that if a victim of a crime died more than a year after a criminal act, that act was not considered to be murder, under a justification that medical science was not capable of establishing causation so far beyond the criminal act, whereby there was reasonable doubt as to the cause of death. This was known as the year and a day rule. The rule dated from as far back as the 12th century, and most modern courts that examined the rule found it to be obsolete given modern medical scientific advances. The court wrote, At common law, the year and a day rule provided that no defendant could be convicted of murder unless his victim died by defendant's act within a year and a day of the act... The Supreme Court of Tennessee... had recognized the... rule... 'was part of the common law [in 1907]... however [in the underlying case involving Rogers], the court found that the original reasons for recognizing the rule no longer exist [at the time of the Rogers homicide].
The Tennessee Supreme Court abolished the rule in the Rogers homicide case, without Rogers having any notice that the rule change would occur. The US Supreme Court held that the Tennessee Supreme Court's abolition of the common-law year and a day rule could apply retroactively to crimes committed before the court abolished the rule under the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution, so long as there was a statutory criminal law passed prior to the criminal act, and the change in common law interpretation of the statutory law was either expected or defensible in reference to that statutory law. Accordingly, the defendant's conviction for murder was sustained on appeal despite the fact that the victim died 15 months after the defendant struck the ultimately fatal blow.
Facts
Rogers stabbed James Bowdery with a butcher knife on May 6, 1994. One of the stab wounds penetrated Bowdery's heart, and during surgery to repair the wound, Bowdery went into cardiac arrest. Bowdery survived, but due to cerebral hypoxia Bowdery slipped into a coma. Eventually Bowdery developed a kidney infection, from which he died on August 7, 1995, 15 months after the stabbing. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as cerebral hypoxia "secondary to a stab wound to the heart."
Rogers was convicted of second-degree murder under Tennessee's homicide statute, which does not include the year and a day rule. Rogers appealed to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, arguing that the year-and-a-day rule was part of the common law of Tennessee, despite its absence from the Tennessee homicide statute. The appellate court disagreed, noting that the state's Criminal Sentencing Reform Act had abolished all common-law defenses in criminal cases, including the year-and-a-day rule.