IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TENNESSEE
AT KNOXVILLE FILED
JUNE 1997 SESSION July 25, 1997
Cecil Crowson, Jr.
Appellate C ourt Clerk
ROGER LEE SAWYERS, )
) C.C.A. NO. 03C01-9607-CC-00255
Appellant, )
) HAMBLEN COUNTY
VS. )
) HON. WILLIAM H. INMAN,
STATE OF TENNESSEE, ) JUDGE
)
Appellee. ) (Post-conviction)
FOR THE APPELLANT: FOR THE APPELLEE:
GREG EICHELMAN JOHN KNOX WALKUP
Public Defender Attorney General & Reporter
D. CLIFTON BARNES MICHAEL J. FAHEY, II
Asst. Public Defender Asst. Attorney General
1609 College Park Dr., Box 11 450 James Robertson Pkwy.
Morristown, TN 37813-1618 Nashville, TN 37243-0493
C. BERKELEY BELL
District Attorney General
VICTOR J. VAUGHN
Asst. District Attorney General
510 Allison St.
Morristown, TN 37814
OPINION FILED:____________________
AFFIRMED
JOHN H. PEAY,
Judge
OPINION
The petitioner filed for post-conviction relief which was denied by the trial
court. This Court affirmed. The Tennessee Supreme Court subsequently reversed and
remanded for a hearing. Following the ordered hearing, the court below denied relief,
from which the petitioner now appeals. Upon our review of the record, we affirm the
judgment below.
In 1976, when he was seventeen years and seven months old, the
petitioner murdered Elmer Trent in the course of robbing him with a firearm. He was not
indicted until 1978; he pled guilty to the murder “a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday.”1
At the time he pled guilty, the petitioner apparently thought that he had been over the age
of eighteen at the time he murdered Trent. He did not discover his real age until 1986.
He subsequently filed for post-conviction relief alleging that the criminal court in which he
pled guilty had not had subject-matter jurisdiction over him because he had been a
juvenile at the time he committed Trent’s murder.
When the petitioner’s claim for relief reached our Supreme Court, it ordered
the case “returned to the trial court for a de novo hearing to determine whether or not [the
petitioner] would have been transferred from juvenile to criminal court, based on the facts
existing at the time of his indictment and trial.” Sawyers v. State, 814 S.W.2d 725, 729
(Tenn. 1991). This hearing was held in 1996 and the court below found that the
petitioner would have been transferred and therefore denied post-conviction relief a
second time. It is from this ruling that the petitioner now appeals.
In ordering this matter remanded, our Supreme Court specifically referred
1
Sawyers v. State , 814 S.W .2d 725, 727 (T enn. 1991).
2
to T.C.A. § 37-1-134(a) and stated that an order of transfer from juvenile to criminal court
“must be predicated on a determination . . . that there are