State of Tennessee v. Marlo Davis

The Defendant, Marlo Davis, was convicted by a Shelby County jury of second degree murder and reckless homicide. Subsequently, the trial court merged the reckless homicide into the second degree murder conviction and imposed a sentence of forty years. In this direct appeal, the Defendant challenges (1) the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions; (2) the mutually exclusive nature of the verdicts and whether the offenses were properly merged; (3) the admission of prior inconsistent statements by a witness, who had no memory of making those statements at the time of trial, as substantive evidence; (4) the imposition of the maximum forty-year sentence in violation of Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004); and (5) the cumulative effect of these errors. After a thorough review of the record and the applicable authorities, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.