State v. Hale

OPINION

ANDERSON, Justice.

Thomas Daniel Eugene Hale was convicted of first degree murder for the beating death of two-year-old Jay Michael Maupin, in accordance with the 1988 amendment to Tennessee’s first-degree murder statute, which eliminated the requirement that the killing be willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated if the child was under thirteen and the death resulted from child abuse. The sentencing jury found the two statutory aggravating circumstances — that Maupin was under twelve years of age, and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel in that it…