Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Other or denomination not established Loudon County, Tennessee, USA · 2015

State v. Crank: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms child-neglect conviction after cancer was treated with prayer

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

2015-02-13

Conviction affirmed; exemption held constitutional and inapplicable on these facts.

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

parent relying on spiritual treatment, associated spiritual-group leader

Organization

Universal Life Church (affiliation)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

After clinic and chiropractor visits revealed a large tumor, the defendant abandoned medical care in favor of prayer-only reliance on a claimed divine healer; the Tennessee Supreme Court addressed whether that reliance qualified for the statutory spiritual-treatment exemption and held it did not.

Spiritual healing or treatment
Threatened spiritual consequence

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2015-02-13 · final appeal — conviction affirmed

Tennessee Supreme Court. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed Jacqueline Crank's conviction for child neglect, holding the spiritual-treatment exemption was not unconstitutionally vague and did not apply where medical care was abandoned in favor of prayer. Sentence: 11 months 29 days unsupervised probation.

Documented coercion mechanisms

prayer-only substitution for cancer treatment
reliance on a claimed healer

Cited record

Sources

state supreme court appellate opinion State v. Crank, 468 S.W.3d 15 (Tenn. 2015).: The Tennessee Supreme Court opinion affirms the child-neglect conviction and analyzes the statutory spiritual-treatment exemption, finding it constitutional and inapplicable where the defendant abandoned medical care for prayer.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2779443/state-of-tennessee-v-jacqueline-crank/ Corpus classification: state-supreme-court; evidentiary role: appellate-opinion. SHA-256 e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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