Memphis Mayor-elect Paul Young on Friday named TBA member Tannera Gibson as his city attorney and Penelope Huston as his head of communications, reports the Daily Memphian. Gibson, a former president of the Memphis Bar Association, was the first Black female partner at Burch, Porter & Johnson and was named one of the country’s top lawyers. She has specialized in government relations, commercial litigation, personal injury and municipal law. Since 2016, Huston has led communications at the Downtown Memphis Commission after working at ALSAC, Memphis in May and Contemporary Media. The city attorney, also known as chief legal officer, is involved in most city contracts and serves as a key advisor to the mayor. The chief communications officer oversees how the city disseminates information and interacts with the media. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an appeal by President Biden's administration of a lower court's ruling in favor of a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged a ban on "bump stock" devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns. Reuters reports the ban was put in place during the Trump administration following a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas using weapons with bump stocks that killed 58 and wounded hundreds more. The case centers on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives properly interpreted a law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks.

The defendant, Amanda Helena Rogers, appeals her Maury County Circuit Court jury convictions of facilitation of attempted first degree murder, facilitation of vandalism of property in an amount of $2,500 or more but less than $10,000, and two counts of reckless endangerment for which the trial court imposed an effective term of 10 years and six months to be served in confinement. On appeal, the defendant asserts that the evidence is insufficient to support her conviction of facilitation of attempted first degree murder and that the trial court erred in imposing the sentence. Discerning no reversible error, we affirm.

A Hamilton County jury convicted Defendant, Tamarion Terrell Johnson, of second degree murder and aggravated assault in the shooting death of the victim, Shawnquell Stanfield. The trial court merged the assault conviction into the murder conviction. Defendant argues on appeal that the trial court improperly instructed the jury on flight and that the evidence was insufficient to support his second degree murder conviction. We affirm the judgments of the trial court.

The Defendant, Adam Janes, appeals the trial court’s denial of his motion for a reduction of sentence pursuant to Tennessee Rule of Criminal Procedure 35. Specifically, the Defendant argues that: (1) he received the ineffective assistance of trial counsel; (2) he entered into his guilty plea unknowingly and involuntarily; (3) the assistant district attorney was prejudiced against him; (4) he was entitled to concurrent sentences; (5) he was not given the opportunity of rehabilitation; (6) his sentence was not the least severe measure necessary to achieve the purposes for which the sentence was imposed; and (7) the State failed to file a notice of intent to seek enhanced punishment. After review, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

MURPHY, Circuit Judge. A state jury convicted Samuel Fields of breaking into an elderly woman’s home, slashing her throat, and stabbing a knife through her head. The police found Fields next to the woman’s body, and he confessed to killing her. At trial, the prosecution argued that Fields got into the woman’s home by unscrewing a porch window with a certain knife that was admitted into evidence; the defense countered that Fields could not have conducted this feat because he was intoxicated at the time of the crime. During deliberations, the jury used this knife to unscrew the screws on a jury-room cabinet. It found Fields guilty and sentenced him to death. Fields later alleged that the jury’s “experiment” with the knife violated the Constitution. The Kentucky Supreme Court disagreed, and a federal district court denied Fields habeas relief.

Fields renews this jury-experiment claim, among others, on appeal. For well over a century, lower courts have debated when jury experiments of this type violate state or federal law. But one court has yet to enter this debate: the U.S. Supreme Court. That fact dooms Fields’s claim in these proceedings. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), we may not grant habeas relief unless a state court has unreasonably applied “clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court[.]” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). Because the Court has not identified any principles to distinguish proper from improper jury experiments, Fields cannot show that the experiment in his case violated “clearly established” law from the Supreme Court. His other claims also cannot overcome AEDPA’s standards. We thus affirm the denial of habeas relief.

A Tennessee haunted attraction billed as a “rough, intense and truly frightening experience” is being investigated by the Tennessee Attorney General's Office after it was featured on a recent Hulu documentary, reports the Tennessean. Assistant Attorney General Kristine Knowles sent a letter to McKamey Manor founder Russ McKamey on Oct. 31 expressing concern over the attraction's business practices of not honoring participants' wishes to stop during the tour. In addition, Knowles questioned whether a $20,000 prize offered to those who complete the tour exists. Located in Summertown, McKamey Manor warns participants that the attraction is not for those who are pregnant, claustrophobic, suffer from seizures, respiratory or heart conditions, or, as the company states, are "wimpy." Knowles said the attorney general's office will be requesting documents from McKamey in the coming weeks.

The deadline for applying to be part of the Tennessee Bar Association’s Leadership Law 2024 class has been extended to Nov. 10. Contact Paul Burch if you have questions about the program or the application process.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a new court filing released yesterday, accused Amazon.com of using illegal strategies to boost profits, including an algorithm, “Project Nessie,” that earned the online retailer more than $1 billion, reports Reuters. Details of the lawsuit, filed in September, were withheld until yesterday when a version with fewer redactions was made public in U.S. District Court in Seattle. The FTC said the algorithm allowed the retailer “to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks,” calling it an "unfair method of competition" because it manipulates other online stores into raising prices, allowing Amazon to do the same. The complaint also accuses Amazon of hiding operations from antitrust enforcers and destroying office communications. In a section of the lawsuit which remains heavily redacted, Amazon allegedly deterred Walmart from offering discounts to online shoppers who picked up their purchases from stores.

Shelby County Criminal Court Judge James Jones Jr. ordered the release of additional records in the Tyre Nichols state criminal case, the Commercial Appeal reports. The records were initially to be released by the city of Memphis in March, but Jones agreed to a motion to block the release until the defense attorneys had reviewed them. The records have been the subject of litigation from a coalition of news media outlets that asked for the records to be released quickly. According to the city of Memphis and the Shelby County District Attorney's Office, the records include more than 20 hours of additional audio and video footage from the night Nichols was beaten by now-former officers with the Memphis Police Department, as well as over 2,000 documents including personnel files and statements made during internal investigations.