11/23/92 State Tennessee V. William West

With the passage of the Appellate Courts Improvements Act of 1992, the jurisdiction of this Court has become almost completely discretionary. *fn1 This means that as to non-capital criminal cases, we function primarily as a law-development court, rather than as an error-correction court. Occasionally, however, a criminal case comes to our attention in which the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain the conviction is seriously in doubt. This appeal is one of those troubling cases, and, thus, we granted review principally to scrutinize the proof offered to convict the defendant of first-degree murder. As noted below, we find that proof to be lacking, and it thus becomes necessary to reduce the conviction to second-degree murder.