Does a state statute only mean what it says and nothing more? In a unanimous opinion by Justice Sarah Campbell, the Tennessee Supreme Court resoundingly said yes.[1]

More importantly, the court gave clear guidance to lower courts as to how judges should determine what a statute says.

The State of Tennessee had declared Marvin Maurice Deberry to be a motor vehicle habitual traffic offender under its then-in-effect Motor Vehicle Habitual Offenders Act.[2] Driving while declared to be a habitual offender, which Deberry did, constituted a Class E felony.

In 2018, police stopped him, prosecutors indicted him, and on May 15, 2019, a jury convicted him.

Two weeks before his conviction, though, the Tennessee Legislature passed the Motor Vehicle Habitual Offenders Repeal Act, which repealed the MVHO Act and provided a pathway for certain habitual offenders to seek reinstatement of their drivers’ licenses.[3] It went into effect on July 1, 2019. This was six weeks after the jury convicted Deberry, and one week before the trial court judge sentenced him.

At his sentencing, Deberry and the State sparred over the effect another Tennessee statute, known as the criminal savings statute, should have on his conviction and sentence. Tennessee’s criminal savings statute provides that “[w]hen a penal statute or penal legislative act . . . is repealed or amended by a subsequent legislative act, the offense . . . shall be prosecuted under the act or statute in effect” when the defendant committed the offense.[4] It goes on, though, to provide a limited exception to this general rule. It says, “[I]n the event the subsequent act provides for a lesser penalty, any punishment imposed shall be in accordance with the subsequent act.”[5]

Deberry argued that because the legislature had completely repealed the MVHO Act by passing the MVHO Repeal Act, the new law provided for a “lesser penalty” (since no penalty was necessarily lesser than the preexisting penalty), and that his situation therefore fell within the criminal saving statute’s exception.

The trial court initially rejected this argument and sentenced Deberry to five years of split confinement and imposed a required fine. Upon reconsideration, though, the trial court agreed with Deberry that “no penalty is a lesser penalty” and entered an amended judgment imposing no sentence on Deberry even though his conviction remained in place. Tennessee’s intermediate appellate court affirmed this judgment.

The Tennessee Supreme Court disagreed, reversed the intermediate court’s judgment, vacated Deberry’s sentence with no punishment, and reinstated the trial court’s original sentence.

The Tennessee Supreme Court said that “[t]his case requires us to interpret the phrase ‘provides for a lesser penalty’ in the criminal savings statute.”[6] And to do this, the court said it had to decide “how a reasonable reader, fully competent in the language, would have understood the text at the time it was issued.”[7] It continued that this “[o]riginal public meaning is discerned through consideration of the statutory text in light of ‘well-established canons of statutory construction.’”[8] The court explained that words must have their “natural and ordinary meaning in the context in which they appear and in light of the statute’s general purpose.”[9]

The court went on to say that “After applying traditional tools of statutory interpretation, we conclude that the phrase ‘provides for a lesser penalty’ does not encompass a statute like the MVHO Repeal Act that eliminates an offense altogether rather than reducing punishment for that offense.”[10] In other words, no penalty is not the same thing as a lesser penalty. To illustrate this point using a common phrase, the court said that “no one would understand a ‘lesser evil’ to include a choice that is not evil at all.”[11]

The court said that “When a statute’s meaning is clear and unambiguous after consideration of the statutory text, the broader statutory framework, and any relevant canons of statutory construction, we ‘enforce the statute as written.’”[12] It said that the Tennessee intermediate appellate court took a “flawed” approach to the case after “summarily concluding” that the criminal savings statute’s phrase “provides for a lesser penalty” was ambiguous.[13] Justice Campbell made clear that a “court should deem statutory language ambiguous only after employing all of the traditional tools of statutory construction, including consulting dictionary definitions, examining statutory structure and context, and applying well-established canons of statutory construction.”[14] She noted that the intermediate appellate court’s “contrary decision rested heavily on the legislative history of the MVHO Repeal Act” and that a court should not “delve into the legislative history of an unambiguous statute.”[15]

Justice Campbell also noted that “[a]pplying new statutes—even ameliorative ones—to conduct that occurred before the statute’s enactment implicates countervailing interests such as fairness and predictability . . .” but that “[d]eciding whether and to what extent these and other ‘competing values’ should be ‘sacrificed to the achievement of a particular objective’ is the job of the legislature” not the courts.[16]

 

[1] State v. Deberry, 651 S.W.3d 918 (Tenn. 2022).

[2] Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-10-616 (2017) (repealed 2019).

[3] Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-10-601 (2020).

[4] Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-112 (2018).

[5] Id.

[6] Deberry, 651 S.W.3d at 926.

[7] Id. at 924 (citing Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 33 (2012)).

[8] Id. (citations omitted).

[9] Id. (citations omitted).

[10] Id. at 926.

[11] Id. at 927.

[12] Id. (citations omitted).

[13] Id. at 930.

[14] Id.

[15] Id. at 929-30.

[16] Id. at 930.

 

 

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