Study of Tennessee Prosecutions
STUDY OF TENNESSEE PROSECUTIONS
Professor Wendy A. Bach
University of Tennessee College of Law
Study of TN-ST 39-13-107 Prosecutions, 2014-2016
Through multi-year, IRB approved study of Tennessee’s fetal assault law, I able to document at least 119 Prosecutions for fetal assault during the period when the law was in effect.1 Key findings are listed below.
The Prosecutions
The prosecutions concentrated in the Northeast and in Shelby County. Below is a heat map that provides a visual representation of the geographic concentration of the prosecutions. The numbers in the map indicate the judicial district. The number of documented prosecutions per district are color-coded from low, colored in green, to high, colored in red.
1 This data is drawn from response to Open Records Requests sent to every General Sessions Court,
District Attorney and policing agency in the state of Tennessee as well as responses provided by
District Attorneys to surveys conducted by the Tennessee Department of Safety.
Data reported below focuses on these two areas:
1. Northeast (1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th Judicial Districts)
2. Shelby County (30th Judicial District)
2 With the exception of race, for which I have data on all 25 defendants, I have detailed court records for only 16 of the 25 women. All data below, with the exception of race, pertains only to those defendants.
3 We were able to document 68 individual prosecutions but were only able to obtain complete court files for 41 of these women. With the exception of drug-alleged, for which we have information on 53 cases, the data in the table below focuses on the information in the court files of these 41 defendants.
4 Defendants were classified as low-income if one or more of three indicators appeared in the criminal court files: she was listed as unemployed; she was listed as homeless; or the court appointed counsel at state expense, a clear indication that the judge had made a determination that she was indigent. I also classified her as low income if her infant’s birth record data listed her household as having an income under $25,000 per year or if more than 50% of those residing in her census tract lived below the poverty line.
