Convicted home invader gets sentence reduced
Convicted home invader Curtis Keller might have been happier with a 30-year reduction in his sentence if his total hadn’t started at 240 years.
Keller, 49, won a hollow victory recently when the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that two of the eight felonies of which he was convicted overlapped or did not apply.
He was convicted of directing a home-invasion robbery in Collierville in a scheme to get his marijuana back. A co-defendant, Aaron Tate, also was convicted and was sentenced to 138 years in prison.
The incident occurred around 3:30 a.m. on May 26, 2010, in the 400 block of South Main Extd. Collierville where the home’s front door was kicked in and a man, his girlfriend and her two sons were held hostage at gunpoint.
Authorities said the man was pistol whipped, and the woman and two children were threatened with guns during the ordeal in which the holdup men demanded money or marijuana.
Keller said he had fronted the man 15 pounds of marijuana, but that he later learned the man was selling the marijuana after telling him it had been stolen.
The d isr uptive 330-pound career criminal nicknamed “Big Daddy” prompted the court to add extra security during his trial. On one day, he entered Criminal Court holding a hand-printed sign that read, “Massive Corruption Within the Court.”
At one point, he punched his lawyer during a conference in a lockup area.
He was convicted and sentenced for multiple felony convictions, but the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals recently dismissed his conviction for employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony because the court nor the jury specified which felony was the basis for the charge.
The appeals court also reduced Keller’s conviction of especially aggravated burglary — which involves serious bodily injury — to simply aggravated burglary. The seri- ous bodily injury to one of the victims already was encompassed in Keller’s conviction of attempted especially aggravated robbery.
Keller, the court concluded, was entitled to a sentence reduction of 30 years, dropping his total to 210 years in prison.
He still has a pending appeal in another homeinvasion conviction, this one a commando-style assault in 2008 on a Germantown family in the Bedford Plantation subdivision.
Keller was convicted of 16 felonies in that case and was sentenced to an additional 300 years.