State of Tennessee v. Tim Gilbert

The defendant, Tim Gilbert, appeals his Giles County Circuit Court Jury convictions of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, unlawful possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, and resisting arrest, challenging the sufficiency of the convicting evidence and the rulings of the trial court permitting the State to amend the indictment and to admit the pretrial statement of a State’s witness as substantive evidence in violation of the rule against hearsay. The defendant also argues that permitting both the grand and petit juries to deliberate in a room in the Giles County Courthouse maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (“U.D.C.”) and adorned with various mementos of the Confederacy exposed the jury to extraneous prejudicial information and violated his constitutional rights to a fair trial conducted by an impartial jury, due process, and equal protection under the law. The trial court did not err by permitting the State to amend the indictment because the amendment did not allege a new or different offense. The court did err, however, by admitting the challenged witness statement, and that error cannot be classified as harmless. Further, we conclude that the Confederate memorabilia in the jury room was extraneous information and that the State failed to rebut the presumption that the petit jury’s exposure to that extraneous information was prejudicial. Accordingly, we reverse the judgments of the trial court and remand the case for a new trial.