Diffee v. State

Jack Holt, Jr., Chief Justice.

The appellant, Judy Diffee, was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of her mother, Edith Durham, and was sentenced to a forty-year term of imprisonment. She raises the following three points for reversal: (1) that the trial court erred in admitting testimony that she had attacked her former husband in an unrelated incident; (2) that the trial court’s application of Act 535 of 1993 (Arkansas’s new bifurcated sentencing laws) to her trial violated the prohibition against ex post facto laws found in the federal and state constitutions; and (3) that…