TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Jun 10, 2022

The Tennessee Supreme Court in a unanimous decision issued today clarified the appropriate legal standard to be applied in post-conviction cases involving allegations of ineffective assistance of counsel due to counsel failing to seek suppression of evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds. The court ruled in the case of Tommie Phillips v. State of Tennessee that such claims must meet a three-prong test to proceed: prove that a suppression motion would have been meritorious, that counsel’s failure to file such a motion was objectively unreasonable, and that, but for counsel’s objectively unreasonable omission, there is a reasonable probability that the verdict would have been different absent the excludable evidence. In this specific case, the court found that Phillips failed to establish a successful claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.