Sawyers v. State

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