TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Kate Prince on Aug 25, 2021

In a new opinion piece for the Tennessean, Brentwood attorney and TBA member Ed Miller writes of his recent analysis of death sentences in Tennessee since 1977 when the death penalty was reinstated. After identifying 2,838 adults convicted of first-degree murder, Miller breaks down and compares the sentences imposed on defendants convicted of murdering a single victim and those convicted of murdering multiple victims. He writes that of the 2,460 defendants with one victim, only 55 have been sentenced to death. Miller says he also identified 335 multiple-victim murderers who were sentenced to life with or without he possibility of parole—six times the number of single-murder defendants who have been sentenced to death. “This demonstrates that a death sentence is not a comparatively proportional punishment for the murder of a single victim,” Miller writes. Read the opinion piece for Miller’s full breakdown of his research.