Gribble v. State

How later courts described this case

• holding that, in capital murder case involving corpus delicti of kidnapping, “[w]hile there is little, apart from appellant’s confession, to suggest that . . . the deceased[] was moved from her residence without her consent and while still alive to the place where her body was ultimately discovered, we are not persuaded that the record is utterly devoid of evidence to this effect[,]” and thus, “any rational trier of fact could have found that there was some evidence that the corpus delicti of kidnapping was sufficiently corroborated”
• concluding, in case involving capital murder committed in the course of a kidnapping, that corpus delicti of kidnapping was established based on the lack of motive to move the deceased’s body from her home, the lack of evidence of a struggle in the deceased’s home, and the discovery of the deceased’s purse in a lake near her body
• stating: “Indeed, when evidence independent of the confession is alone sufficient to prove corpus delicti, the jury need not even be instructed that an extrajudicial confession must be corroborated.”
• holding that the State adequately proved the corpus delicti of kidnapping even though the facts were “ambiguous in some respects and far from adequate to support the conclusions they impl[ied]”

Written by the judges who cited it.