Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-13-503

Rape

Applied in 18 court decisions — leading case United States v. Lopez-Solis (2006)

Most recently applied in Ivan Valdez Amador v. Merrick Garland (March 2022)

Acts 1989, ch. 591, § 1; 1995, ch. 484, § 1; 1997, ch. 406, § 1; 2005, ch. 353, § 11.

How often courts cite this section

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.

(1) Rape is unlawful sexual penetration of a victim by the defendant or of the defendant by a victim accompanied by any of the following circumstances: Force or coercion is used to accomplish the act;

(2) The sexual penetration is accomplished without the consent of the victim and the defendant knows or has reason to know at the time of the penetration that the victim did not consent;

(3) The defendant knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally defective, mentally incapacitated or physically helpless; or

(4) The sexual penetration is accomplished by fraud.

(5) Rape is a Class B felony.

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.