Caprice McLemore v. Knox County, Tennessee
Syllabus
Caprice McLemore, Gary McLemore, Misty Tanner, Barrett Tanner, and McKinley Tanner (together, \Plaintiffs\ or \Appellants\) appeal from the judgment of the trial court dismissing their case against the defendant, Knox County (\Appellee\ or \the County\). Appellants were injured in a car accident on Clinton Highway after being struck by a vehicle driven by Roy Michael Simmons (\Mr. Simmons\), who was evading a Knox County sheriff's deputy. Plaintiffs filed suit against the County, alleging that it was liable for their injuries arising from the accident. Following a bench trial, the trial court concluded that the deputy pursuing Mr. Simmons did not act unreasonably under the circumstances and that the County was thus not liable for Plaintiffs' injuries. Plaintiffs timely appealed to this Court. Discerning no error, we affirm.
How courts have described this case
Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.
- noting that without benefit of a curative or limiting instruction to disregard comment on defendant’s silence, defendant may have been “impermissibly convicted solely on the basis of [his] post -Miranda silence”
- reversing conviction and remanding for new trial upon finding that Doyle errors not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt
- reversing conviction where a defendant’s post-arrest silence “was the touchstone of the government’s ease-in-chief, its cross-examination of the defendant, and its closing argument during [the] trial of short duration”
- “The prosecutor’s argument directly linked the implausibility of [defendant’s] exculpatory story to his ostensibly inconsistent act of remaining silent.”
- “When the use of a defendant’s silence results in a constitutional violation, the conviction can stand only if the reviewing court is satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the error was harmless.”
- Doyle error not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt where the prosecution’s references to the defendant’s post-Miranda silence occurred during direct examination of a government witness, during cross-examination of the defendant, and in closing argument
Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).
Sourced from CourtListener / Free Law Project (CC0).
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