Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

One of the principles of criminal law that best illustrates the importance of having an experienced criminal defense attorney by your side is what is called a mistrial. Simply put, a mistrial can be declared when something happens during a trial that is unfair to one side or the other and is so damaging to the aggrieved party that it necessitates abandoning the trial and starting all over. Most often, this happens in jury trials when the jury becomes "tainted" by being exposed to evidence that should not have been allowed in at trial or in some other way that would cause the jurors to treat one side unfairly.

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Authorities say a New Mexico woman allegedly caused over one hundred thousand dollars worth of damage a couple of Fridays ago when her friends left her on the side of the road in Amarillo, Texas and she decided, while intoxicated, to commandeer a nearby John Deere tractor to make the 91-mile trip home. According to authorities, the woman forgot to turn the headlights on while operating the tractor and almost immediately ran over several power poles, causing the entire town of Bushland, Texas to experience a blackout. Her rural rampage eventually came to an end when she crashed the tractor into the front of a convenience store. She was arrested on charges of felony unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and driving while intoxicated.

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Many states recognize the criminal law doctrine of transferred intent, which, as the name would indicate, allows a defendant's intention to harm one person to be "transferred" to another person for the purpose of charging the defendant with a crime. For example, if a man shoots at a woman intending to kill her, but his bullet misses and wounds a child in the arm, that man can be charged with the attempted murder of the child even though he did not actually intend to kill the child because his intent to kill the woman would transfer over to the child.

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Many legal and police dramas center around "cold cases," which are cases for which all leads have seemingly disappeared and the authorities have given up hope of finding the individual(s) responsible for committing the crime. Far too frequently in those dramas, a miracle break occurs in the case that leads the police to the killer. Although such a break rarely comes along in the real world, a story from the L.A. times reveals that just last week, a gang member named Anthony Garcia was convicted of first-degree murder after a bizarre break in a murder case from 2004 led to his arrest.

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A defendant's prior criminal history is one of the most important considerations in any criminal case. It affects every stage of trial, from how the prosecutors approach the defendant with regard to plea bargaining to how the defendant can be portrayed at trial (assuming the defendant makes the questionable decision to testify) to how the defendant is sentenced once convicted. Without a doubt, the defendant's prior criminal history plays its biggest role at the sentencing stage of trial, primarily because Tennessee law allows the defendant to be sentenced to a longer period of incarceration at trial if the defendant has a substantial prior criminal history. What then, one might ask, constitutes a "prior" criminal history.

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Any Facebook user knows how addicting some of the games provided on the website can be, whether its through first-hand experience or just by observing one of your Facebook "friends" playing some farming game for seventy-two solid hours and posting every action on their wall for the world to see. While being addicted to a computer game of any type may seem like a harmless addiction, it was anything but for a northern Colorado woman who let her thirteen month- old son drown on September 20 of last year when she left him in a bathtub alone while she went to check her status and play games on Facebook. She was sentenced to ten years in prison.

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News outlets in the state of Tennessee have been abuzz since last Wednesday with the story of Holly Bobo, a twenty-year-old nursing student from the Memphis area who was last seen by her brother on Wednesday as she was apparently being led into the woods against her will by a man in camouflage. Although clues regarding the abduction have been found and the family reportedly believes the abductor is someone who is familiar with the habits of Ms. Bobo and her family, she is still missing as of the time of this writing and volunteers are scouring the Tennessee woodlands on foot and ATV in an effort to locate her.

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If you have ever watched any of those reality television police shows where they interrogate murder suspects for hours on end in order to get a confession out of them, then you know that criminal suspects are often subjected to some pretty questionable treatment by authorities who are badly wanting them to confess to one or more crimes. Very often, law enforcement officials will promise suspects that if they will just confess or go ahead and enter a guilty plea to the charges that things will go much more smoothly for them. In one sense, the authorities are correct in that the Defendant will usually have a nice, quick trip to prison and be able to avoid the hassle of going through a trial. Overwhelmingly, however, the decision to confess or enter a guilty plea before talking to an attorney is the absolute worst course of action a defendant can take.

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In deciding to consider a defendant's appeal in a recent case called State v. Mitchell, the Tennessee Supreme Court took it upon itself to decide whether or not an individual can be charged with disorderly conduct for words that do not amount to "fighting words" which essentially means words that do not incite violence or otherwise threaten someone in some substantial way. To make a long story short, the defendant in this case was arrested for causing a scene and allegedly acting aggressively toward a police officer at an anti-immigration rally, including calling the officer derogatory racial slurs. The defendant was convicted of disorderly conduct and appealed, asserting among other things that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected his right to use derogatory slurs toward the officer.

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From the Go Big Or Go Home school of April Fool's pranks comes the story of Rhodia Wallace, a thirty year-old City Hall secretary from Cleveland who tried to prank her boyfriend but ended up getting the scare. According to reports, Ms. Wallace apparently called her boyfriend to inform him that a gunman was firing shots in City Hall and that she was trapped under her desk. Not surprisingly, her boyfriend did not stop to consider that it may simply be a harmless April Fool's prank, instead preferring to contact the authorities immediately. They were not amused, and Ms. Wallace was arrested and taken to jail. Fortunately for her, she was released without charges.

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Evidence in criminal cases comes in as many different types as the suspects that leave such evidence behind. In every criminal case that goes to trial, the likelihood of the defendant being convicted depends largely on the type of evidence that the authorities are able to gather, with the most important characteristic of that evidence obviously being how strongly that evidence links the suspect to the crime. Some of the strongest forms of this type of evidence are DNA evidence, fingerprints found at the scene, eyewitness accounts, and, of course, t-shirts left at the scene that have a picture of the suspect on them.

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One of the quickest ways to get in the news is to do something that may happen to spawn a clever headline. Needless to say, when someone "drives through" the wall of a museum dedicated to the most famous item to ever have been sold at a "drive-thru" the headlines right themselves. Thus, it should come at no surprise that when a twenty-two year-old Pennsylvania man crashed his car through the wall of the Big Mac Museum Restaurant allegedly due to the fact that he was driving while he was sauced, tons of meaty headlines and cheesy puns would ensue.

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