Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

For a criminal defendant, one of the most damaging pieces of evidence at trial can be a prior conviction. The admission of a prior conviction via impeachment can do irreparable damage to a defendant, making them appear untrustworthy, dishonest, or otherwise not credible as to their testimony. As such, both state and federal courts provide defendants with protection in the form of a multi-prong test that must be met before the prior conviction can be admitted.

First, the witness must be asked about the conviction on cross-examination. Basically, this means that the conviction can’t just be entered into evidence without the witness being asked about it. The thrust of this rule is that such convictions cannot get into evidence if the witness does not take the witness stand. This gives the witness the opportunity to admit, deny, or explain the conviction and allows the witness to have a fair chance to mitigate the damage that the conviction might to do his or her credibility or case.

Second, the crime must either be a felony or be a crime of dishonesty or false statement. This basically means that petty crimes and misdemeanor offenses that have nothing to do with the witness’s character for truthfulness will not be admissible. This reflects a conscious determination that felonies and offenses bearing on truthfulness are the only prior convictions with enough relevance to be presented to the jury in the courtroom.

Third, if the witness is the defendant in a criminal trial, the State has to give the defendant reasonable written notice of the conviction before trial, and the court must make a determination that the conviction's probative value as to credibility outweighs its unfair prejudicial effect on the substantive issues. The court can rule on the admissibility of the conviction prior to the trial but it must rule prior to the testimony of the accused. If the court makes a final determination that such proof is admissible for impeachment purposes, the accused does not have to actually testify at the trial to later challenge the court’s admission of the conviction.

The rule also contains various other protections designed to make sure that the conviction is relevant in the current proceeding. One of those protections is a rule that a conviction is much harder to get admitted if more than ten years has elapsed since the conviction or release from incarceration, depending on the circumstances. Such evidence is also not admissible in some circumstances where the defendant has received a pardon. In sum, although such evidence can be very damaging to the defendant, the defendant also has a substantial amount of protection against the admission of convictions that are not relevant and meaningful to the case at hand.