## Facts

- A 1995 Dodge Caravan was taken from a gas station in Orlando, Florida when a fourteen-year-old passenger drove away without the owners’ permission.
- About twenty minutes later, Lon Mitchell Pierce, Jr. agreed to drive the van, and he, the teenager who initially took the van, and a third teenager traveled to Virginia and Tennessee over the next several weeks.
- The group stayed with relatives or in motels and drove to various Tennessee cities; they switched license plates to avoid detection.
- Roughly twenty days after the initial taking, law enforcement located the van in Virginia and pursued it, with Pierce driving.
- The pursuit crossed into Tennessee, where a deputy attempted to stop the van with a roadblock.
- The van collided with the deputy’s patrol car and struck the deputy, who died almost immediately from the injuries.
- Pierce was convicted in state trial court of first-degree felony murder, with theft of the van alleged as the predicate felony.

## Issues

1. Whether the evidence was sufficient to prove that the deputy’s death occurred “in the perpetration of” theft so as to support a first-degree felony-murder conviction.
2. Whether continued possession and use of stolen property can extend the theft sufficiently to satisfy the “in the perpetration of” requirement when the killing occurs weeks later in a different state.

## Decision

- The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the intermediate appellate court’s judgment affirming the conviction.
- The court held the evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to establish that the homicide was committed “in the perpetration of” the theft.
- The felony-murder conviction was vacated, and the case was remanded for a new trial on charges consistent with the ruling.

## Legal Principles

- Felony murder requires a close connection between the homicide and the predicate felony in time, place, causation, and continuity of action.
- Theft is not treated as perpetually “ongoing” for felony-murder purposes merely because the defendant remains in possession of stolen property.
- A homicide occurring after the predicate felony has ended, and arising primarily from efforts to evade arrest rather than to accomplish the theft, is not “in the perpetration of” the theft.
- On sufficiency review, if no rational trier of fact could find the required nexus between the felony and the killing, a felony-murder conviction cannot stand.

## Conclusion

The court limited felony-murder liability by requiring a concrete nexus between the predicate felony and the homicide, and held that a fatal collision during flight from police twenty days after a completed theft was too remote to qualify as a killing “in the perpetration of” theft.


State v. Pierce, 23 S.W.3d 289 (Tenn. 2000)