Tennessee Judicial Corruption Continues Unabated

by Sharon Rondeau

(Aug. 29, 2025) — Last week The Post & Email spoke with a relative of Tennessee inmate Kevin Lee Waggoner, on whose Union County prosecution we reported nearly a decade ago.

The Case

In late 2015, Waggoner was acquitted 11-1 on a charge of second-degree murder arising from an altercation with a neighbor, Michael A. Woodby, who Waggoner shot and killed on the evening of September 16, 2013.

At the time, the Woodbys and Waggoners lived across the road from each other on Highway 370 in the small town of Luttrell. Waggoner, a school security officer, was taking an evening walk with his then-21-year-old son, Kolton, when Woodby reportedly ran up from behind and struck Kolton with a club or “cane.”

Kolton was also initially indicted but ultimately called as a prosecution witness without being offered immunity.

Waggoner has described his actions that day as self-defense, a stance he maintains.

The long-simmering feud between the Woodbys and the Waggoners began, Waggoner told us in a November 2015 interview, after Waggoner refused to sell Woodby a firearm through his gun shop due to Woodby’s criminal history. Waggoner’s testimony given during his first appeal in Knoxville is consistent with that explanation.

Waggoner videoed many of the interactions between Woodby and his family and sent the footage to the Knoxville News Sentinel, among other media outlets, as, according to Waggoner, local law enforcement took no action against Woodby. Jamie Satterfield, a longtime KNS crime reporter, posted at least one of Waggoner’s videos on YouTube depicting Woodby shouting expletives at Waggoner’s son and approaching him as he crossed the street to retrieve the mail on several different days.

Public reporting and a court appellate opinion suggest the Waggoners were the perpetrators of the growing hostility between the two neighbors.

“It took eight months before it finally went to grand jury,” Waggoner told us following his 2015 acquittal.  “They had to redo grand jury because they found out just a few weeks before trial was going to start that we had a change of DAs and ADAs during the process.  They discovered that the first grand jury foreman was out that day, and in Tennessee it is required that the judge appoint the new foreman.  That is not the way it was done; they either elected their own or somebody else appointed him.”

Judges and Juries, the Tennessee Way

Beginning in September 2009, The Post & Email reported extensively on Tennessee judges’ contortion of the law by which they hand-pick grand jury foremen “from wherever they choose” rather than from the “venire,” the group of grand jurors chosen by random means. Through court documentation and judges’ own admissions, we further discovered that for decades, notwithstanding state code to the contrary, the practice of judicially-chosen grand-jury foremen has often created a longstanding court employee serving at the pleasure of the judge.

The Fifth Amendment tasks grand juries with examining evidence brought by the government against an individual, issuing a “True Bill” in the case of what the jurors see as sufficient evidence to produce a criminal charge or a “No True Bill” if they find the evidence unconvincing.

Following Waggoner’s acquittal, Tennessee’s Eighth Judicial District prosecuted for a second time, after which Waggoner was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in state penitentiary by Judge E. Shayne Sexton.

“The prosecutor didn’t win this big case the first time and had to lie and manipulate to get a win with the help of a corrupt judge,” the relative said. “I think that Judge Sexton just has too many friends. He was a judge for about 30 years and a prosecutor before that. I think he knows where the bodies are buried, in other words. So he got off on this stuff. I’ve talked to several attorneys, and some of them have literally turned him in to the appellate court because of the stuff he did in his courtroom, but nobody did anything about it.”

“Jury tampering” was one of the allegations the attorneys levied against Sexton, the relative told us.

“The Woodby family got caught talking about the trial to witnesses, and the only thing the judge did was reprimand them,” the relative said.  “The Woodbys lied to the court about me and the judge, just taking their word, was going to throw me off the courthouse grounds and not let me back.  I got really upset and threatened to sue them, so the judge left me alone.  This went on the whole trial, and to this day we can’t figure out why the court or the police let them get away with so much.”

Sexton retired in 2022 and was succeeded by Zachary Walden.

Waggoner, now 54, continues to appeal his conviction. A post-conviction petition claiming constitutional violations during the trial was heard last fall, with Walden denying relief.

Walden “ignored” the very basis of Waggoner’s claim, the relative said, instead “bringing in all this other stuff.”

“Judge Walden was supposed to have his opinion done by February,” the relative added, “which would have been 90 days, but 90 days came and went, 95, 100…it took him until March before he ever made a decision, and all he said was, ‘I believe the prosecution; I don’t believe the defense.'”

A hearing on Waggoner’s second direct appeal is scheduled for the fall.

Withheld, but Why?

Writing for Tennessee Lookout since at least 2022, Satterfield reported, and the relative recalled during our interview, that an appellate court had ordered Sexton to turn over trial recordings Waggoner had sought through a lawsuit after Sexton refused to release them.

Satterfield wrote:

After Waggoner was convicted, he first sought a copy of the audio recording of his trial from Sexton during a motion hearing. Sexton refused the request. Waggoner then began filing requests for the audio via the Tennessee Public Records Act and eventually sued Sexton and Williams in Davidson County Chancery Court.

As part of that litigation, Sexton filed an affidavit saying trial audio recordings are not “part of the official record of Mr. Waggoner’s trial proceedings” and that he was keeping the Waggoner trial audio in his office because he feared Waggoner would tamper with it.

“The proof at trial established that (Waggoner) and his family were technophiles, very adept and skilled with electronic recording equipment both video and audio, and, in fact, (Waggoner) recorded his own 911 call to the police after killing the victim,” Sexton wrote in the affidavit.

“In addition, during the course of (Waggoner’s) trial, other members of his family engaged in conduct intended to disrupt the proceedings, including attempts on their part to record the court proceedings via a cell phone and/or transmit the court proceedings via cell phone over the internet,” Sexton continued.

“I prohibited these efforts,” the judge wrote. “It was, and continues to be, a concern of the court that if (Waggoner) is provided the audio recording of the proceedings or even a copy of the audio recording, he or members of his family will attempt to alter the recording in some fashion to create the appearance of an inaccuracy in the official trial transcript. To reiterate, the audio recording, which is in the possession of my office, is not part of the official record of Mr. Waggoner’s trial proceedings.”

“For years we asked for a copy of the audio of the trial, and the judge confiscated every audio, every piece of paperwork that had to do with Kevin, and refused to let anyone see or hear them,” Waggoner’s relative said to that point. What Waggoner received “months later,” the relative said, was thumb drives they immediately suspected were incomplete. “They’re easily manipulated,” the relative asserted. “So we said, ‘No, we don’t want thumb drives; we want copies of the original CDs from the trial.”

“The only thing the appellate court said to that was, ‘Well, we got you copies.’ Then we said, ‘But they’re not right.'”

“‘Well, you probably forgot; it’s been so many years,'” the relative said the family was told by the court, after which they responded, “‘No, we remember; there’s too many of us.'”

“So we’ve never been able to get copies, and we figure by now they’ve been destroyed,” the relative concluded.

When an individual asked to listen to the recordings on court premises, he was refused access, the relative said.

Judge Meets with Prospective Jurors, Denies Fifth Amendment Right

Waggoner’s relative recounted that for the second trial, juror candidates were told to report to the county high school’s gymnasium to complete initial questionnaires; local reporting states they were gathered in the auditorium. A July 14, 2016 article by Satterfield notes Sexton “turned aside” Waggoner’s request for a change of venue and spoke directly to “hundreds of potential jurors” that day about the trial, set for August 2.

Satterfield also reported:

With a retrial looming in a deadly neighborhood feud involving a former Knox County Schools security officer, 600 Union County residents have been summoned as potential jurors as a judge tries to avoid moving the case to another jurisdiction.

‘Your county needs to take care of its business,’ 8th Judicial District Criminal Court Judge Shayne Sexton told the hundreds of men and women who gathered Thursday in a high school auditorium to fill out jury questionnaires. ‘I think you can. This is to make sure we’re doing it properly.’

In addition to the meeting at the school, the second trial was rife with corruption, the relative told us. Present in the courtroom that day and at each hearing, the relative recalled anomalies observed both inside and outside the Union County courthouse, including a juror speaking with Woodby’s widow in the parking lot and Sexton “forcing” Kolton Waggoner to testify against his father or “go to jail” after invoking his Fifth Amendment right on his attorney’s advice.

The transcript states Sexton threatened Kolton Waggoner with “contempt of court.”

“At one point,” the relative said, “Kevin’s attorney got really upset over this Fifth Amendment thing, and he took the paper up to the judge and said, ‘You need to read this,’ and the judge said, “I know what this says; I’ve read this. This is my courtroom. I make the decisions here.”

When first reporting on Waggoner’s case, The Post & Email suggested a second trial constituted a violation of his Fifth Amendment right prohibiting “double jeopardy.”

Those comments, the relative said, were omitted from the transcript. As The Post & Email has reported, a number of other Tennesseans have claimed their transcripts were “doctored.”

“They couldn’t get DA Effler to testify (at the post-conviction petition hearing), and the court said he didn’t have to because he was too busy,” the relative continued. “They said the reason he was down at the gym was he was selecting the grand jury, but according to Tennessee law, the judge has to select the jury, not the DA. On the stand, the judge said, ‘No, there was no grand jury being selected that day.’ So the lies continue, and DA Effler never had to testify.”

Jared Effler was elected District Attorney General for Tennessee’s Eighth Judicial District in 2014 for an eight-year term and in 2022 re-elected “without opposition.” He is currently serving as president of the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference executive committee.

“(Defense Atty. Scott) Lanzon was on the witness stand during the post-conviction hearing, and he said he never knew about any meeting at a gym,” the relative also recalled. “No one ever told him or his office. Had he known, he would have asked for a change of venue and judge, because that was highly prejudicial.”

“You just do not let potential jurors see your face before a trial,” the relative quoted Lanzon as having testified.

Representing himself at the time, Waggoner submitted a supplemental post-conviction brief in which he stated he had been seeking copies of the full audio “since October 2017…Not
having access to copies of the original unedited audios prevents the Petitioner from being able to
prepare properly, prejudicing the defendant, preventing him from having a complete record as the law and constitution demands.”

“By them going down the street to a gym and not even having the defense or the defendant there…the judge said he went down there and told them what the case was about,” Waggoner’s relative said. “There was no recorder. They didn’t have a reporter come so that way, nobody knew who was down there or exactly what was being said to the jurors. Supposedly the jurors were filling out questionnaires, but you don’t need a judge, a DA and an ADA to select jurors.”

Jurors for the first trial were not summoned in that manner, the relative said.

During the post-conviction hearing, the same relative recalled Waggoner’s attorney asking the circumstances by which the meeting in the gym occurred:

The prosecution claimed it didn’t have time to send letters because it was too close to the trial date. They said they put it in the paper. We’ve done some investigation, and we can’t find any paper that had any notification of jurors meeting at a gym. There was afterwards, telling people that they met down at the gym, but this was after the fact. There is nothing we can find that notified. So we’re not sure even yet; it had to be a lot of phone calls telling these people to go down to the gym, and of course not all of them were able to make it. And they said they had to fill out the questionnaire and date it that day. Well, we’ve seen a lot of the questionnaires, and they’re all dated July 14, when they were down at the gym, but a lot of them are dated after that, so we figured a lot of them didn’t make it down to the gym, and they filled it out and returned it to the court later.

We asked the relative how Waggoner is faring in prison. “He has ‘up’ days and ‘down’ days,” was the reply. “He has a lot of people on his side. A lot of the COs are rooting for him.”

Conversely, however, the situation “has been heartbreaking,” the relative said. “He’s had threats on his life.” She added:

One thing is:  The neighbors behind the Woodbys said that the Woodbys were the perpetrators in the confrontations.

Second:   The Waggoners know nothing about technical stuff.  We would have to hire someone to do what all the court accused us of and no one tried to record anything during the trial on the Waggoner’s side but boy they did on the Woodby’s side and when pointed out to the court all the court said is they can have their cell phones in court.  

Third:  The court is the one who kept the trial recordings and manipulated them to take out incendiary remarks   This was told to Kevin’s uncle by the recorder herself. And court recordings are a part of the trial’s official records.  The appellate court finally told this to Sexton.

Fourth:  As for the 911 scanner, that was done by Kevin’s wife so she could hear what the police were saying. Kevin is on there talking but he never turned it on.  This was a stupid thing done by Kevin’s wife.  Nonetheless, Kevin called 911 after the shooting and asked for an ambulance, but the judge wouldn’t let that in the trial.