State of Tennessee v. Eric Matthews

The defendant, Eric Matthews, was charged by the Shelby County Grand Jury in two separate indictments with especially aggravated kidnapping, a Class A felony, aggravated kidnapping, a Class B felony, and two counts of aggravated rape, a Class B felony, based on events involving the victim, V.T.,1 that occurred on August 14, 1999, in the Whitehaven area of Memphis. Following his 2003 trial,2 he was acquitted of the rape counts and convicted in both the especially aggravated and aggravated kidnapping counts of the lesser-included charge of kidnapping, a Class C felony.  Applying four enhancement and no mitigating factors, the trial court sentenced the defendant as a Range I, standard offender to concurrent terms of five years in the county workhouse. In a timely appeal to this court, the defendant challenges both the sufficiency of the evidence and the sentencing imposed. Based on our review of the record and applicable law, we conclude that the evidence is sufficient to sustain the convictions but that the trial court erred by failing to merge the kidnapping convictions into a single judgment of conviction. We further conclude that three of the four enhancement factors were applied in error under the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. ___, 124 S. Ct. 2531 (2004), which was released after the sentencing was imposed in this case. Accordingly, we affirm the convictions, but order that they be merged into a single conviction and modify the sentence imposed from five to four years, to be served in the county workhouse.