Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-16-602

Resisting stop, frisk, halt, arrest or search — Prevention or obstruction of service of legal writ or process

Applied in 17 court decisions — leading case Purnell v. State (2003)

Most recently applied in Linda Moser v. Etowah Police Dep't (March 2022)

Acts 1989, ch. 591, § 1; 1991, ch. 307, § 1; 1999, ch. 178, § 1.

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) It is an offense for a person to intentionally prevent or obstruct anyone known to the person to be a law enforcement officer, or anyone acting in a law enforcement officer's presence and at the officer's direction, from effecting a stop, frisk, halt, arrest or search of any person, including the defendant, by using force against the law enforcement officer or another.

(2) Except as provided in § 39-11-611, it is no defense to prosecution under this section that the stop, frisk, halt, arrest or search was unlawful.

(3) It is an offense for a person to intentionally prevent or obstruct an officer of the state or any other person known to be a civil process server in serving, or attempting to serve or execute, any legal writ or process.

(4) A violation of this section is a Class B misdemeanor unless the defendant uses a deadly weapon to resist the stop, frisk, halt, arrest, search or process server, in which event the violation is a Class A misdemeanor.

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.