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The Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld the battery conviction of a Hancock County jail inmate who had successfully appealed his initial conviction only to get a harsher sentence after the retrial.
Appellant Jeremy Tyler Ferrell wound up with a 22-year sentence after appealing his initial conviction with a 20-year sentence. The appellate court upheld the conviction with the longer sentence in part because new evidence had emerged in the lead up to the retrial.
Ferrell was an inmate in the jail in August 2022 when an argument started in his cell after he asked one of his cellmates for a bag of chips from his commissary stash.
While Ferrell and the cellmate gave slightly different accounts of what happened next, at some point, Ferrell punched his cellmate in the eye and ruptured it, court documents state. The damage blinded the cellmate in that eye.
Ferrell was charged with two counts of felony aggravated battery with a habitual offender sentence enhancement and was sentenced to 20 years.
He appealed his conviction, arguing that the trial court erred in rejecting his counsel’s request for a self-defense instruction to the jury. Ferrell had testified in his own defense during his first trial.
The Indiana Court of Appeals agreed with Ferrell and ordered a new trial for the case.
While preparing for the second trial, Ferrell’s newly appointed public defender requested evidence from the jail to show that Ferrell had no need to fight over the chips because his commissary account was full.
Among the evidence submitted by the jail were phone calls Ferrell made to friends that appeared to show Ferrell’s lack of remorse, according to court documents.
The phone calls were presented as evidence in his second trial, and the jury found him guilty of two battery charges.
The judge for his second trial, who was the same judge for the first one, then sentenced him to 22 years in prison. The judge agreed with the state’s argument that the new evidence painted Ferrell in a worse light, court documents state.
On appeal over his second conviction, Ferrell had argued that imposing a more severe sentence after a retrial violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Under the clause, a state court can’t impose a harsher sentence on every reconvicted offender solely to punish the offender for succeeding in having their original conviction set aside, according to case law.
However, the Indiana Court of Appeals states that Ferrell’s situation does not violate the clause because the trial judge didn’t impose the harsher sentence solely to punish Ferrell.
Instead, it was imposed because the trial judge found that Ferrell’s jail phone calls showed a lack of remorse, according to court documents.
The appellate court affirmed Ferrell’s 22-year sentence.
The opinion was written by appellate Judge Mary DeBoer. Judges Paul Felix and Stephen Scheele concur.
The case is Jeremy Tyler Ferrell v. State of Indiana, 25A-CR-3215.
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