Cortez Sims may have shot and killed a 14-year-old boy during a gang feud in 2014, but unless prosecutors can prove he gained financially from the alleged crime, Sims’ defense attorneys say he shouldn’t be tried for it under Tennessee’s racketeering law.
Hamilton County’s top prosecutor, Neal Pinkston, used that law for the first time in March to charge 54 people with conspiring to commit crimes for the Athens Park Bloods. Pinkston says that street gang is responsible for killing a state’s witness, burglarizing homes, starting fires, selling drugs and using ill-gotten proceeds to bail members out of jail. At a minimum, the 54 defendants face a Class B felony that carries 12 to 20 years in prison. Others, including Sims, face murder charges.
But some defense attorneys say the law requires Pinkston to prove defendants had a financial gain for each alleged crime they committed for the gang. So far, he hasn’t done that in the Sims case, attorneys Josh Weiss and John Cavett say.
“Murders and attempted murders are committed for an almost infinite variety of reasons, but only rarely for financial gain,” Weiss and Cavett wrote in a motion filed Tuesday in Hamilton County Criminal Court. “The [state’s] presentment, devoid of any language at all that informs Sims of the factual allegations of financial gain, is constitutionally defective and therefore should be dismissed.”
In this April 4, 2017, staff file photo, Cortez Sims walks into Judge Barry Steeleman’s courtroom at the start of his trial.Pinkston’s spokeswoman, Melydia Clewell, declined to comment Wednesday. But Weiss and Cavett pointed to the racketeering law, which legislators amended in 2012 to make it possible to prosecute street gangs.