Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

A New Jersey woman is being charged with filing a false report after police say that she made up a story about being the victim of a carjacking to cover up the fact that she crashed her car while having sex. The woman and her accomplice who was driving the car were apparently having an intimate moment of sorts when the car ran off the road and crashed into a tree. According to police officers, the woman then tried to set the car on fire to cover up the accident. When that did not work, she apparently contacted police and told them a fairly elaborate story about being the victim of a carjacking at gunpoint and said that the injury left her with several injuries including a broken arm. After the woman was subjected to further questioning, she finally admitted the truth and was charged with filing a false report.

In Tennessee, filing a false report is a felony and can earn the offender years worth of jail time, so presenting a strong defense to such charges is critical. A criminal defendant charged with filing a false report is not going to be able to deny that the report was made altogether, so a defendant’s best hope for avoiding or reducing jail time may be to rely on the existence of mitigating factors if the defendant was in some sort of altered mental state (not due to the voluntary use of intoxicants) or was under some sort of duress that reduced the defendant’s mental culpability for filing the report. For example, if the woman in this scenario had an abusive husband and lied to the police out of fear that her husband would uncover her illicit affair if he knew the truth, then that situation, though not serving as a legal defense to the crime, could serve to lessen her culpability for the offense and thus to reduce her sentence.

Source: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/other/1110/07-15-2010/20100715055004_09.html