In United States v. Starr, 159 F.4th 901 (11th Cir. 2025) (Newsom, Jordan*, Honeywell (MDFL)), the Court affirmed the defendants’ interstate murder for hire convictions, in violation of 18 U.S.C. s. 1958,  arising from the murder of Jason Starr’s ex-wife, Sara Starr.

In affirming the murder for hire convictions, the Court also held:

  1. The district court not violate the brother’s constitutional right to present a defense by excluding evidence of an alternate perpetrator, who had a “complicated relationship” with the victim, made odd statements prior to his suicide, and had a motorcycle that could have been the one seen outside of Sara’s home in the days leading up to her murder, where the alternate perpetrator had an apparent alibi at the time of the murder, the defendants did not identify any accomplice that could have committed the murder for the alternate perpetrator, and, generally, there was an insufficient “nexus” between him and the murder, such that the district court correctly excluded this evidence under Rule 403.
  2. The district court properly admitted Sara Starr’s out-of-court statement that “he’s going to kill me” to the friend who had just helped her secretly move out of the home she had shared with Jason, as an excited utterance, because it was said “immediately” after Jason left her new residence, and the friend testified that Sara was “shaking and crying” and “absolutely terrified” that Jason had found her new residence and shown up unannounced.
  3. The district court did not abuse its discretion by admitting out-of-court statements to an FBI agent for their “effect on the listener,” where those statements were solicited from the agent with “careful” phrasing from the gov’t, as ordered by the court, and admitted with a limiting instruction that they were admitted only to show their effect on the investigators and could not be accepted as true.
  4. The evidence was sufficient evidence a reasonable jury to find that “Jason had caused Darin to travel in interstate commerce (from Texas to Alabama) to murder Sara, by paying him $2,600 and buying him a motorcycle.”

Jordan wrote a concurrence criticizing the Supreme Court’s standard for evaluating the admissibility of third party defense evidence—which allows such evidence to be excluded if it “does not sufficiently connect the other person to the crime”—as at odds with the government’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (and the defendants absence of a burden).  Jordan went on to say that: “if I were writing on a clean slate, I might reach a different conclusion” and “the fact that the defendants . . . were unable to identify Mr. Michalski’s alleged accomplice in the murder should not have necessarily resulted in the exclusion of the evidence and, therefore, may have denied them the ability to present their theory of defense. Because an alleged third-party perpetrator is not on trial, the evidence proffered need not ‘prove or even raise a strong probability that a person other than the defendant committed the offense’ so long as it ‘tend[s] to create a reasonable doubt’ as to the defendant’s guilt.” (quoting United States v. Moore, 590 F. Supp. 3d 277, 283 (D.D.C. 2022)).

https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202410131.pdf