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Tennessee appellate court hears challenge to aggravated-child-neglect conviction over fentanyl ingestion
Summary
In oral argument, defense counsel said the state lacked proof that Jesse Craddock knowingly ingested fentanyl and therefore could not be convicted of aggravated child neglect or felony murder; the state countered with motel video, a fentanyl bindle found in the defendant’s sock and toxicology showing fentanyl and a clinical response to Narcan.
An appellate court in Tennessee heard arguments challenging the sufficiency of evidence behind convictions for aggravated child neglect and felony murder in the death of a five-month-old.
“ I can recognize why a jury convicted Jesse Craddock, and not because of the sufficiency of the evidence, ” defense counsel Stephanie Perera told the justices as she urged reversal on the grounds that the State failed to prove the requisite guilty knowledge or a continuing course of neglect.
Perera said the record shows the infant was healthy before the traumatic injury and argued the neglect cases Tennessee courts have recognized involve a continuing failure to seek care or remedy a known problem. She told the court there is “not proof that he knew he took fentanyl,” and stressed conflicting expert testimony about whether fentanyl in this case could have entered the defendant’s system transdermally or only through active ingestion.
State counsel Will Lundy responded that the circumstantial record permitted a jury to infer active ingestion and neglect. Lundy described motel video evidence and other testimony that, he said, placed a neighbor (Daniel Law) in Craddock’s room, showed the defendant soon thereafter collapse while holding the infant, and identified a bindle of fentanyl in the defendant’s sock. “Within minutes, the defendant who was holding the victim collapsed on the ground outside on top of the victim and smothered her to death,” Lundy told the court, and he said hospital staff observed opioid-overdose signs that improved after administration of Narcan.
Lundy also urged the court to reject a vagueness challenge, citing settled Tennessee precedent and arguing the statute’s mens rea and duty elements were satisfied by evidence that the defendant, as the child’s sole caregiver, knowingly ingested substances that could incapacitate him and thereby placed the infant at risk.
Justices pressed both sides on technical and evidentiary points that shaped the competing narratives: whether transdermal transfer could plausibly explain fentanyl in the bloodstream, whether the record contained proof the defendant was actively seeking drugs that day, and how the trial record — including the morning dismissal of aggravated-abuse language from the indictment — affected trial strategy and the jury’s inferences.
Perera used reserved rebuttal time to underscore what she called gaps in proof: she noted the jury was not permitted to rely on facts not in evidence and emphasized the absence of testimony showing prior incapacitation while caring for the child. She repeated that, in her view, Tennessee cases treating neglect as a continuing course of conduct do not fit the factual pattern shown here.
The court took the arguments under advisement and said it would issue an opinion in due course before adjourning.
