Have you looked at Tenn. Code Ann. §47-18-104 lately? It now contains 50 unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting the conduct of any trade or commerce. Your client who violates the statute is a Class B misdemeanant. Of more practical importance, because criminal prosecutions are rarely brought, is the potential civil liability of your client.

During three months in 1997, Paul Reid murdered seven victims connected with fast-food restaurants in Middle Tennessee.

On Sunday morning, Feb. 16, Reid shot Steve Hampton and Sarah Jackson as they were opening the Captain D’s on Lebanon Road in Donelson. He stole over $7,000.[1]

A month later, on Sunday, March 23, at the end of the nightshift, Reid shot Ronald Santiago, Andrea Brown, and Robert Sewell in the McDonald’s on Donelson Pike in Hermitage. He stabbed Jose Ramirez Gonzales, who feigned death and survived to testify.[2]

I wrote about this topic in September 2005. Much has changed since then.

What is the rate? In the good old days the victor got a 10 percent rate. That got whittled down effective July 1, 2012. Now postjudgment interest is “equal to 2 percent less than the formula rate per annum published by the Commissioner of Financial Institutions.”

Tenn. Code Ann. §47-14-121. You can find this rate on the Administrative Office of Courts website at www.tncourts.gov. The rate has been 5.25 percent.

Suppose a male criminal shot a female victim in the head, killing her. Suppose further the male immediately sexually penetrated the female. Does such conduct constitute the crime of aggravated rape as codified at Tenn. Code Ann. §39-13-502? That was the issue in State v. Brobeck, 751 S.W.2d 828 (Tenn. 1988).

In the spring of 1983 Jim Thornton was finishing his second year at Memphis State Law School. He was living in an apartment, separated for a couple of months from his wife Lavinia Johnston Thornton and their young son Will, 3. The latter occupied a nice house a short distance away in the Germantown area.

On Tuesday, May 3, the threesome went to an early supper at Houlihan’s. Lavinia announced to Jim that she had met a man and planned to date him. In truth she met medical student Mark Allen McConkey the previous Saturday and had been hosting nightly sex.

The modern illiterati have coined the verb “to go missing.” Bob Armstrong did that back in literate days. On Monday, Aug. 19, 1974, he left his wife Wanda (Elwanda) and two daughters and two foster sons in Hendersonville to take a trip to Texas. Nothing seemed unusual at first. Armstrong, 40, sold life insurance and traveled a lot. But on this trip, unbeknownst to his wife, he was accompanied by another insurance agent. She was Wanda Green, the young mother, 21, of a young daughter, 4.

In a Nashville mansion on the night of Thursday, Aug. 15, 1996, lawyer Perry Avram March murdered artist Janet Gail Levine March while their son, 5, and daughter, 2, were in beds upstairs. The killer stuffed his wife’s body in a leaf bag and drove it to a remote area. He later enlisted his father Arthur to dump the bag of skeletal remains in a brush pile beside Interstate 65 north of Bowling Green, Ky.

Because of subsequent roadwork, probably those remains will never be found.

On Tuesday night, Sept. 26, 1995, Virginia “Jenny” Jackson entered Bronco’s Bar at Dickson. She was 43, the divorced mother of a daughter, 20, and a son, 16. By 11:30 p.m. no cabs were available, and the only other remaining customer was Jerry Ray Davidson, 50. Jackson accepted his offer of a ride.

By Adam J. Schrager | Fulcrum Publishing | $16.95 | 332 pages | 2013

The subject of this book is Arthur Koehler (pronounced Ka’ler), the key prosecution witness in the 1935 New Jersey trial of Bruno Hauptmann for murdering the Lindbergh baby. Hauptmann built a ladder to climb into the second-floor nursery to kidnap Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.

The sixteenth rail was cut from a floor plank in Hauptmann’s attic. How do we know that? Because Koehler proved it to the jury.

What procedural remedies are available to a plaintiff homeowner if a defendant neighbor owns trees with encroaching limbs and roots? That question arose in Lane v. W.J. Curry & Sons, 92 S.W.3d 355 (Tenn. 2002).