Tennessee can charge people for crimes they didn’t commit, advocates want reform

In 2001, Shawn Hatcher was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison for murder. Prosecutors used a Tennessee law to charge him with a crime he says his brother committed. He was 17 years old.

The concept of criminal responsibility for conduct of another isn’t particularly new or unheard of. It’s been a part of American common law – the sets of laws inherited from past judicial decisions – since at least the 19th century. And it’s been an official part of Tennessee’s state code for decades.

“[It was] a law which I wasn’t aware of at the time,” Hatcher said. “I was a child. I didn’t even have a GED, I hadn’t even graduated high school. So I was ignorant to that.”

Criminal justice reform groups are mobilizing to challenge the law, saying it unfairly affects minority groups and young people, such as Hatcher.

Theeda Murphy is the director of Abolition Works TN, a criminal justice reform group that has helped introduce legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly that would eliminate criminal responsibility provisions from state law.

“It has been used to draw in anybody who is even just tangentially related to the incident, or to the person who did it,” Murphy said. “It’s used to rope in a whole bunch of people that the prosecutors just feel should not be on the street so they can connect you to this person and what they did, even by sometimes very thin evidence.”

Prosecutors argue the law is helpful for securing convictions and keeping criminals behind bars. Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference Executive Director Stephen Crump spoke at a legislative panel reviewing the bill in March.

“If you go somewhere to rob somebody, and as a result of that, somebody gets murdered, you are guilty of murder,” Crump said before the panel. “You are attempting and assisting and helping that person commit the underlying crime, and if it results in someone’s death, you shouldn’t get a pass.”

The bill’s sponsors, state Sen. Raumesh Akbari and Rep. Jesse Chism, both Democrats of Shelby County, deferred the bill to next year to make time for summer study and discussion among lawmakers before bringing it to a full vote.

But the conversation surrounding criminal responsibility isn’t over. For some, it’s just getting started.

Advocates push for reform

Just over a year ago, Free Hearts, another criminal justice reform group, was approached by Shawn’a Hatcher, Shawn’s wife. She wanted to share her husband’s story and see if the group would be willing to help.

Free Hearts works with people who are incarcerated to ensure that their living conditions are bearable on the inside, and to secure clemency for those they feel have been wrongly convicted. They also provide a participatory defense program that helps families and loved ones navigate the criminal justice system.

Jada X, a statewide organizer for the group, participates in weekly virtual meetings with families as part of the program. Just over a year ago, she met Shawn’a on one of the calls.

“We have these Zoom calls where we meet every Tuesday and we talk through the cases,” X said. “And so I remembered her coming that way. … She had basically been a Free Heart on her own, championing not just Shawn … but she’s always been an advocate for folks.”

Shawn’a first met her husband in 2018 when he started sending his tithes from prison to her homeless ministry in Nashville.

They were married a few years later, in 2021. Shawn’a said their relationship is more spiritual than anything.

“We pray together, fast together, and that gives us our strength and our energy,” she said. “I mean, it gets challenging sometimes, but I mean, it was a choice we made.”

Shawn’a and Shawn were married in 2021, three years after Shawn began mailing donations from prison to Shawn’a’s nonprofit.
Shawn’a studied criminal justice in college and felt that she could apply her degree to helping her husband overturn his criminal responsibility conviction.

“So I just started fighting for him,” Shawn’a said. “He was a scared kid in high school and his junior year, his life got stolen from him because of his brother.”

After speaking with Shawn’a and learning Shawn’s story, Free Hearts has since added him to their clemency watch list. It’s a pledge of trust and support from the group, and adds his name to a list of many others that Free Hearts is trying to free from prison.

“We are presenting cases – not letting them die – making sure that they stay alive and at the forefront of the governor’s office desk so that he won’t be overlooked, he won’t be forgotten,” X said.

Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has yet to meet with Free Hearts organizers. So they’ve also turned to legislators to exact change.

Legislative efforts

Free Hearts and Abolition Works TN approached Sen. Akbari and Rep. Chism during this year’s legislative session to introduce a bill that would eliminate criminal responsibility language from Tennessee law.

“A lot of young people get in trouble for this,” Akbari said. “So they might be driving a vehicle. They think that maybe their colleague – or whoever – is going to try and rob a store, but they don’t realize they’re going to commit murder. And so then that individual is also charged with murder because they were a part of the crime.”

Akbari and Chism said they are trying to align punishments with the intent of the person who commits a crime, not to see people who commit crimes go free.

“We think it just aligns more with the crime that’s been committed,” Akbari said. “We’re not trying to stop someone from being punished. If they commit a crime, they should be punished. But … aligning the punishment with the crime, that’s our goal.”

But the bill has not been without its opponents. When presented to a legislative panel in March, the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference, spoke in opposition to the legislation, saying criminal responsibility laws are essential to securing convictions.

Because criminal responsibility for conduct of another is a prosecutorial theory rather than a formal charge, data on how often it’s used is scarce. When asked if they could provide data to the judiciary committee in March, the TDAGC said that they would try to come up with it in time for next year’s session, beginning in early 2026. The conference did not provide additional comment for this story.

Legislators also expressed skepticism about the bill’s ability to pass committee, so Akbari and Chism ultimately made the decision to delay the bill to next year’s session and take it into summer study. There, it will be circulated among legislators where it can potentially be tweaked to be more palatable to Tennessee’s Republican Party, which holds a supermajority in both chambers.

“There’s a lot of conversations that need to be had, and we need to look at what’s going on across our country to see what other states are doing in this case … to see what’s working and what’s not working as well,” Chism said. “We’ve built a foundation, but now [we need to] start to put the sheetrock on the walls and get the paint ready.”

While they await the result of pending legislation, Free Hearts continues to share Shawn’s story along with the others who have been convicted based on the theory of criminal responsibility for conduct of another.

“I’m just waiting on God to open doors for me,” Shawn said. “I know it’s His will more so than mine that I be free, because He wrote my story from beginning to end. I’m currently just waiting on whatever avenue that may come from.”

This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU in Kentucky and NPR.