Severance :: Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

Defendants in criminal cases often find themselves in the unfortunate situation of being tried for multiple offenses in the same trial. This may or may not be appropriate depending on the circumstances of the case, but being on trial for several offenses poses some substantial risks to the defendant. The primary risk that the defendant faces is being convicted for one or more offenses based on evidence presented for the purpose of proving other offenses. For example, if the defendant is simultaneously on trial for arson and kidnapping, the jury may hear disturbing evidence related to the kidnapping and become prejudiced against the defendant, thereby jeopardizing his chance at a fair trial for the offense of arson. Judges are very careful to instruct juries under such circumstances to consider each offense separately in light of the proof, but a risk such as the one described above is not one that a defendant wants to take unless he or she absolutely has to.

The Tennessee Rules of Criminal Procedure recognize that being tried for multiple offenses at once can jeopardize a defendant's rights; thus, the rules contain a provision to separate the charges from each other (called "severance") when necessary and afford the defendant as many trials as he or she needs to be tried fairly on all counts.

Under Tennessee law, a defendant has the right to have any charges against him tried separately unless they are "part of a common scheme or plan" or the evidence of each offense would be admissible at the trials of the other offenses. To argue for a severance, a defendant will have to show that the offenses and the evidence necessary to prove them are distnct enough from each other that they should not be tried together. This is where the assistance of a skilled criminal defense attorney comes into play, because making such an argument will require knowledge of the various applicable evidentiary rules and their application in the courtroom. A successful argument for severance often results int he defendant breaking one large trial down into several more manageable trials, decreasing the amount of evidence that will be presented in each trial and increasing the defendant's chance for success.