ELIZABETHTON â A man who had been accused of holding a Dominoâs delivery driver at gunpoint in 2020 pleaded guilty in Carter County Criminal Court on Tuesday on charges of unlawful possession of a weapon by a felon and aggravated assault.
Eric Rodney Banner, 47, was sentenced by Criminal Court Judge Lisa Rice to eight years on the unlawful possession charge. That sentence is to run consecutively to a three-year sentence for a conviction in Unicoi County. Banner was categorized as a standard offender and will have to serve 30 percent of the sentence before he is eligible for parole.
On the aggravated assault charge, Rice sentenced Banner to three years, to run concurrently with the unlawful possession sentence.
A Johnson City man was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for raping a woman on the East Tennessee State University campus two years ago.
David Franklin Creech, 43, was apparently not very difficult for law enforcement to identify as the rapist after he showed up at a hospital ER with a bite wound â which was inflicted by the woman he raped.
Creech, who was charged after the February 2019 incident, entered an Alford plea, also called a best interest plea, to charges of aggravated rape, especially aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault and criminal exposure to hepatitis C.
A best interest plea means the defendant believes the state has sufficient evidence that a jury could reach a guilty verdict and chooses to plead guilty instead of taking their chances at a trial.
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