Court Rulings

The Defendant, Joan Odell, appeals from her felony conviction for failure to appear, which resulted in a sentence of two years in the Tennessee Department of Correction. On appeal, the Defendant asserts that the evidence is insufficient to support her conviction and challenges the jury instructions. She also contends that the State engaged in purposeful discrimination in striking a prospective juror in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986). We conclude that the evidence is sufficient to support the conviction and that there was no reversible error in the instructions. However, the trial court failed to comply with the procedure set forth in Batson by denying the Defendant's Batson claim based upon the Defendant's race, and we remand for a hearing on the issue.

Magistrate's Decision adopted that relator had not demonstrated the Industrial Commission abused its discretion when it declined to exercise its continuing jurisdiction over the award of permanent total disability compensation to claimant. The commission found claimant's allowed physical conditions independently rendered him unable to return to sustained remunerative employment. The subsequent disallowance of the psychological condition did not and would not change that fact. Relator's objection overruled. Writ of mandamus denied.

The plaintiff mother and her minor child, T, an elementary school student, sought to recover damages from the defendant city of Waterbury and the defendant Waterbury Board of Education for injuries that T sustained when she was physically assaulted by two or more schoolchildren on a Waterbury public school playground during recess. The plaintiffs alleged, inter alia, that the defendants and their employees failed to adequately supervise the schoolchildren, including T, both in and out of the classroom. The case was tried to the court, which found that T's injuries were the result of the defendants' failure to provide sufficient personnel to exercise proper control over the number of students on the playground at the time. There was evidence introduced at trial that the school had a student population of about 400 and that at least 2 paraprofessionals who attended the incident involving T ran from inside the building to address the situation. The defendants appealed to the Appellate Court from the judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, claiming that the trial court improperly rejected the defendants' special defense of governmental immunity, incorrectly concluded that T's injuries were caused when an inadequate number of staff members were assigned to supervise up to 400 students when there was evidence that there were no more than 50 students on the playground at the time in question, improperly found, in the absence of expert testimony, that the number of assigned staff members was insufficient to control as many as 400 students, and improperly awarded certain damages. The Appellate Court concluded that, in the absence of expert testimony, the trial court could not properly have found that the defendants breached their duty of care to T on the basis that there was an allegedly inadequate number of adults on the playground to supervise the students. Accordingly, the Appellate Court reversed the trial court's judgment and remanded the case to that court with direction

This is the second in a succession of three cases concerning Section 5 of the Public Safety Act of 2016, which took effect on January 1, 2017, and amended Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-14-105, the statute providing for grading of theft offenses. In 2016, before the amended version of the statute took effect, Charles Keese, the defendant, was convicted of theft of property in the amount of $1,000 or more but less than $10,000, a Class D felony at the time of the offense. In sentencing the defendant before the amendment's effective date, the trial court applied the amended version of the statute, which graded theft of more than $1,000 but less than $2,500 as a Class E felony, and sentenced the defendant accordingly. Both the State and the defendant filed notices of appeal. The Court of Criminal Appeals, after determining that appellate jurisdiction over the sentencing issue raised by the State was proper, vacated the sentence and remanded for entry of a sentence reflecting a conviction of a Class D felony. We granted the defendant's application for permission to appeal in this case in order to consider (1) whether the State had the right to appeal the trial court's sentencing decision, and (2) whether the Criminal Savings Statute, Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-11-112, should apply to the amendments of the theft grading statute where, as here, the offense occurred and the defendant was sentenced before the statute's effective date. We conclude that the State had a statutory right to appeal the sentence pursuant to Tennessee Code Annotated section 40-35-402(b)(1). In addition, we agree with the Court of Criminal Appeals' determination that the Criminal Savings Statute applies to the amendments to Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-14-105. We also agree with its ultimate conclusion that the trial court erred in sentencing the defendant under the amended version of the statute prior to its effective date. We, therefore, affirm the judgment of the Court of Cri