In addition to the jurisdiction in criminal cases as conferred in §§ 16-15-401 and 16-15-501, the court of general sessions is vested with jurisdiction to try and determine and render final judgment in all misdemeanor cases brought before the court by warrant or information where the person charged with the misdemeanor enters a plea of guilty in writing or requests a trial upon the merits and expressly waives an indictment, presentment, grand jury investigation and jury trial. The waiver shall be in writing as provided in Rule 5 of the Tennessee Rules of Criminal Procedure. In such cases, the trial shall proceed before the court without the intervention of a jury, and the court shall enter judgment, and, as an incident thereto, may inflict punishment within the limits provided by law for the particular offense as the court may determine proper under the peculiar circumstances of the case.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 40-1-109
Jurisdiction of general sessions courts
Applied in 5 court decisions — leading case Hickman v. State (2004)
Most recently applied in Thomas v. Haslam (July 2018)
Code 1858, § 4969; Shan., § 6930; mod
How often courts cite this section
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.
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.