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298 Ark. 358

767 S.W.2d 522

Richie v. State

Supreme Court of Arkansas

Decided April 10, 1989

Supreme Court of Arkansas · decided 1989-04-10

Relies on Hill v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1989-04-10

How this case has been cited

Cited by 22 later decisions — most recently May 2025

22 state decisions

8019891990200020102020decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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John I. Purtle, Justice, concurring.

¶1It is the duty of the state to make specific allegations in the information or amended information. In this case we have had to guess at the underlying felony. The trial court made a logical conclusion in deciding that all three felonies at issue supported the capital murder charge.

¶2If we are to strictly construe criminal statutes we must conclude that the trial judge was right. Our guess as to the underlying felony is no better than his, but we are right because there are more of us. All four of the charges concerning the criminal acts against Dorothy Mullen grew out of one episode, and all four of the charges concerning the criminal acts against Axie Criner grew out of one episode. Perhaps the state intended to prove that all of the other felonies were supporting the capital felony murder charge and the attempted capital murder charge. See, e.g., Hill v. State, 275 Ark. 71, 628 S.W.2d 285 (1982). However, the prosecution and the court should not strive to multiply the crime and sentence beyond the facts. After all, the appellant cannot be expected to serve more than one life sentence.

¶3The majority captions the decision as a reversal, but it seems to me to be more of an affirmance.

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