More on the Upcoming Tennessee Supreme Court Docket
When the Tennessee Supreme Court hears a criminal case, it has the ability to redefine, reinterpret or otherwise affect an area of Tennessee criminal law in a substantial way. Thus every case that comes before the Court is worthy of discussion since it may have a lasting impact on the criminal framework. One such case, State v. Brown, will consider two separate issues that are fairly common in the criminal context.
The first issue is that of lesser included offenses. A lesser included offense is an offense of which all the elements are included in a greater offense, but the greater offense has additional or different elements and a more severe penalty (with rare exceptions). In this case, the defendant contended that the trial court erred by failing to instruct the jury as to criminally negligent homicide when the defendant was charged with felony murder. Instruction as to lesser included offenses can be key for defendants in cases like this, primarily because it informs the jury that there are lesser offenses for which the defendant can be convicted. The jury may not be willing to let a defendant walk away without facing some sort of punishment in some situations, so they may be tempted to convict the defendant of a more serious offense than is actually fair in order to prevent the defendant from walking away scot-free. The defendant will try to convince the Tennessee Supreme Court that the trial court erred in failing to let the jury know that a lesser included offense was available rather than just the felony murder charge he was facing.
The second issue the court will address is the issue of harmless error. Simply put, when a court commits any sort of error in a criminal trial, that error will only warrant a reversal or vacation of the conviction if the error actually could have or did make a difference in the case. In this case, the intermediate appellate court ruled that the failure to instruct the jury on the lesser included offense was harmless error because all of the evidence received contradicted the defendant’s story of how the victim was killed. Basically, the court said that the failure to instruct the jury as to the limiting instruction did not really make any difference in the case.
The outcome of this case should be interesting and could have repercussions for the way harmless error and lesser included offenses operate in criminal trials, meaning it is one that both Knoxville defense attorneys and Tennesseans as a whole should keep an eye on.
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