Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-13-505

Sexual battery

Applied in 15 court decisions — leading case State v. Mixon (1999)

Most recently applied in United States v. Nathan Richard Vineyard (December 2019)

Acts 1989, ch. 591, § 1; 1995, ch. 484, § 2; 1996, ch. 675, § 74; 1997, ch. 256, § 3; 1997, ch. 406, § 3; 2005, ch. 353, § 12.

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) Sexual battery is unlawful sexual contact with a victim by the defendant or the defendant by a victim accompanied by any of the following circumstances: Force or coercion is used to accomplish the act;

(2) The sexual contact is accomplished without the consent of the victim and the defendant knows or has reason to know at the time of the contact 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 contact is accomplished by fraud.

(5) As used in this section, “coercion” means the threat of kidnapping, extortion, force or violence to be performed immediately or in the future.

(6) Sexual battery is a Class E 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.