Hill v. State

Gregory, Justice.

The defendant was convicted of the murder of Joanne Daniel and sentenced to life imprisonment. The only issue raised on appeal is that the trial court abused its discretion in ruling competent to testify the victim’s son and a neighbor’s child, both eleven years of age. Both children witnessed the victim’s murder, and testified they observed the defendant shoot the victim in the back as she ran through the glass of her bedroom window in an attempt to escape him.

The statutory test for determining the competency of a child to testify is that the child understand the nature of…