APPELLATE COURT OPINIONS

An Obion County Circuit Court jury convicted the defendant, Ernest Lee Littles, of rape of a child, a Class A felony. The trial court sentenced him as a child rapist to twenty years in the Tennessee Department of Correction, with 100% of the sentence to be served. In his appeal as of right, the defendant claims only that there was insufficient evidence to support his conviction. We affirm the judgment of the trial court but remand for entry of a corrected judgment

The sole issue in this appeal is whether the trial court erred in ordering the defendant to pay $18,000 in restitution. We reverse the judgment of the trial court regarding restitution and remand this matter for further proceedings.

The defendant was convicted of premeditated first degree murder by a Davidson County jury and sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. In this appeal, he contends (1) the evidence was insufficient to sustain his conviction; (2) he was denied the opportunity to retain his counsel of choice; (3) the state committed prosecutorial misconduct when it failed to sua sponte redact a portion of an audio tape, and the trial court improperly denied the defendant's request for a mistrial; and (4) the trial court erred when it failed to instruct the jury on facilitation of first degree murder and voluntary manslaughter as lesser-included offenses of first degree murder. After reviewing the record, we affirm.

The defendant, Antonio Rico Walls, was convicted of the sale of over .5 grams of cocaine within 1000 feet of a school, in violation of the Drug-Free School Zone Act, and appealed the conviction. Subsequently, he pled guilty to three additional counts of the indictment alleging the same offense, and was sentenced to concurrent fifteen-year sentences for each offense. The pleas of guilty purported to reserve, as a certified question, the claim that the Drug-Free School Zone Act is unconstitutional. We conclude that it is not, and, further, that the evidence at the defendant's trial was sufficient to support his conviction. Accordingly, we affirm the judgments of the trial court.

Allen Jean Stephens appeals from his Weakley County Circuit Court conviction of Class D felony theft of property. Stephens claims in this appeal that the lower court erred in admitting the telephone records of the business that the defendant defrauded in the course of committing his crime. Because we hold that these records were erroneously but harmlessly admitted, we affirm.

The defendant, Michael Williams, was convicted of rape, a Class B felony, and sentenced to thirty years in the Tennessee Department of Correction as a violent offender. In his appeal, he argues that the evidence at trial was insufficient to support his conviction for rape. However, we disagree and affirm the judgment of the trial court.

Defendant, Brian Keith Gilmer, pursuant to a negotiated plea agreement, pled guilty to four counts of rape, Class B felonies, and five counts of rape of a child, Class A felonies, in Case No. 6975 in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County. On the same date, he pled guilty to five counts of rape, Class B felonies, in Case No. 8161 in the Circuit Court of Sevier County. The victim in all counts, in both counties, was Defendant's stepdaughter. Sentencing was to be determined by the trial court (which was the same for both counties), but the negotiated plea agreement was structured such that the total effective sentence would not be less than 15 years or more than 50 years. Defendant also pled guilty to other criminal offenses as part of the plea agreement, but these are not relevant to this appeal. Although Defendant filed a notice of appeal indicating that he was appealing the sentences imposed in both the Jefferson and Sevier County cases, in effect, this appeal challenges only the length of sentences of the Class A felonies in the Jefferson County case, and the fact that one Class A felony was ordered to be served consecutively to the other sentences. We affirm the judgments of the trial court.

Defendant, Shaun A. Turner, alias Shaun Andre Turner, appeals from the trial court's order revoking his probation and ordering him to serve two consecutive sentences in the Department of Correction. After reviewing the record, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

The defendant, Erick Darnell Bailey, appeals his first-degree murder convictions imposed following a jury trial in the Davidson County Criminal Court. The defendant was tried and convicted on both felony-murder and premeditated-murder counts in the indictment, and the  trial court merged the convictions into a single conviction of first-degree murder. The single issue raised on appeal is whether the convicting evidence is sufficient to support the verdicts. We modify the conviction for premeditated murder to second-degree murder and affirm the conviction for first-degree, felony murder. The second-degree  murder conviction merges into the felony murder conviction.