Standards to Review, Part 3: Abuse of Discretion

“My mistress with a monster is in love.”

- A Midsummer Night’s Dream III, 2; Puck on Titania’s falling in love with the donkey-headed Bottom, due to enchanted flower juice on her eyelids.

              I celebrate my 50th blog post by quoting from one my favorite comedies.  Puck, mischievous sprite that he is, puts a donkey’s head on Bottom, a poor Athenian weaver. The Fairy Queen Titania is bewitched, falling in love with the donkey-headed man (or man-bodied donkey, depending on how you look at things). Hilarity ensues.

          The appellate practitioner might say that Puck’s decision to transform the Athenian was an abuse of his magical discretion, leading to clear error in need of correction.

            When your client is appealing a judge’s decision subject to an abuse of discretion on appeal, you will need a bit of professional magic to overcome such a difficult standard of review.  I suggest you meet the challenge head-on.

             The abuse of discretion standard applies in a variety of circumstances. For example, it applies to decisions to admit or exclude evidence. An abuse of discretion is found to have occurred only when the trial court “applied incorrect legal standards, reached an illogical conclusion, based its decision on a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence, or employed reasoning that causes an injustice to the complaining party.” State v. Tolle, 591 S.W.3d 539, 545 (Tenn. 2019) (citing State v. Davis, 466 S.W.3d 49, 61 (Tenn. 2015)). In Puck’s case, he made a clearly erroneous assessment of the lengths to which one should go to make poor mortals mad, applying incorrect standards and reaching an illogical conclusion, i.e., that a man with the head of an ass makes a good love interest for a Fairy Queen.