Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-101

Objectives of criminal code

Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case State v. Hill (1997)

Most recently applied in State v. Hill (November 1997)

Acts 1989, ch. 591, § 1.

How often courts cite this section

1995199730
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

The general objectives of the criminal code are to:

(1) Proscribe and prevent conduct that unjustifiably and inexcusably causes or threatens harm to individual, property, or public interest for which protection through the criminal law is appropriate;

(2) Give fair warning of what conduct is prohibited, and guide the exercise of official discretion in law enforcement, by defining the act and the culpable mental state that together constitute an offense;

(3) Give fair warning of the consequences of violation, and guide the exercise of official discretion in punishment, by grading of offenses; and

(4) Prescribe penalties that are proportionate to the seriousness of the offense.

Current official text: Tennessee Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Tennessee statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.