As Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Roger A. Page plans to retire at the end of August, six judges from around the state are vying to replace him. In the coming days, The Tennessee Star plans to profile each of the applicants.
The first judge in the biography series is Judge J. Ross Dyer of the Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals Western Section.
Dyer, who graduated from Millsaps College in 1995 and then from the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in 1998, was appointed to his seat in 2016 by then-Governor Bill Haslem (R). The vacancy he filled on the appellate court was that of Page, who had just been appointed to the state Supreme Court.
From 1998 to 2014, Dyer was the assistant attorney general for the criminal justice division of the Nashville office of the Tennessee Attorney General. During part of that period, from 2004 to 2014, Dyer served as senior counsel and managing attorney for the Memphis office of the Tennessee Attorney General.
He served as the Shelby County Attorney from 2014 to 2016 until his appointment to the appellate court. He served his first six-year term and was retained by 73 percent of voters in a 2022 retention vote.
The Star’s overview of the opinions written by Dyer during his past two years on the bench shows that he has mostly upheld criminal convictions, and in many cases denied petitions from appellants seeking remedies that were not based on the facts of their cases.
One case in particular earned Dyer media attention.
In 2000, a man named Courtney Anderson was sentenced to almost 169 years in prison for multiple counts of theft and forgery. As a repeat offender, he was given the maximum sentence.
In 2022, at age 55, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office appealed Anderson’s convictions to District Court Judge Paula Skahan, claiming that Anderson should be set free because he was initially sentenced based on sentence enhancement guidelines that do not exist anymore.
Anderson won his appeal and was released from prison in December of 2022.
The state appealed his release, and in an opinion written by Dyer, the appellate court found that the district court did not have the authority to reduce Anderson’s sentence and release him.
“Upon our review of the applicable law, the record, and the briefs and arguments of the parties, we conclude the trial court lacked jurisdiction to act upon the petitioner’s motion to reopen as the motion was 1) barred by the statute of limitations and no basis for tolling the statute was pled or found and 2) no constitutional infringement was pled, proven, or found,” Dyer wrote in his opinion. “Additionally, the actions of the trial court constituted an impermissible commutation of the petitioner’s sentence—an action delineated by the Tennessee Constitution solely to the Governor. Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the trial court and reinstate the petitioner’s original sentences.”
Gov. Bill Lee’s Council for Judicial Appointments will hold a public meeting on January 4 at the Belmont College of Law, Randall and Sadie Baskin Center to interview the six applicants for the position.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
Background Photo “Tennessee Supreme Court” by Antony-22. CC BY-SA 4.0.
