State of Tennessee v. Lavon Nunnery

After a bench trial, the Rutherford County Circuit Court convicted the defendant, Lavon Nunnery, of misdemeanor assault for threatening to turn his pit bulldog loose on his neighbor. The trial court subsequently sentenced him to eleven months, twenty-nine days in the county workhouse, to be served consecutively to the three-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon for which he was on probation at the time of the instant offense. In a timely appeal to this court, the defendant challenges the sufficiency of the convicting evidence, arguing that the proof was insufficient to show that the victim reasonably feared imminent bodily injury from the dog. Following our review, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.