TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Kate Prince on Aug 4, 2021

Judge Angelita Blackshear Dalton has overturned the conviction of a man who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the 2000 killing of a Nashville woman, the Tennessean reports. In 2003, Paul Shane Garrett was convicted in the blunt force trauma death of Velma Tharpe and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released in 2011. Much of the case rested on what Dalton called “Garrett’s now ‘debunked’ confession” that he allegedly gave to police, though it was not caught on tape. Defense attorneys from the Tennessee Innocence Project say Garrett never confessed to the crime and that police were aware “within a month of his arrest” of DNA evidence from the crime scene that did not match Garrett. "The techniques used by Detectives ... were, at best, questionable and led the court to rely on inaccurate and misleading information," Dalton found. A formal dismissal hearing in the case has yet to be scheduled.