According to the affidavit, Scott came home around 1:40 a.m. on July 16 and found Morton hiding under the bed of her 13-year-old daughter. She screamed at him to get out of her house. He left. She followed him out the door. Her daughter and a neighbor both said the gunshot came after that. Officers arrived to find Morton unresponsive in the front yard with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. When a neighbor came over, Scott said she had shot him. She later told police she saw a man under her kid’s bed and did what she had to do.
Public reaction has been overwhelmingly on Scott’s side, and the most common thing being said online is some version of any mother would have done the same. The law does not ask that question, which is the part of the Memphis mom shooting case that most of the coverage is skipping.
Tennessee’s castle doctrine gives a resident the right to use deadly force against someone who unlawfully and forcibly enters their home, when the resident reasonably believes there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to someone inside. That protection is built around a person who is still inside your house and still a danger. Morton was neither at the moment the shot was fired. The affidavit does not allege that he threatened Scott, her daughter, or anyone else. It says he was leaving, that she followed him out, and that the wound was to the back of his head in the front yard.
That is why the charge landed where it did. A shot fired into the back of a retreating man outside the home is the single hardest fact pattern to defend under a self defense theory, because self defense in Tennessee is measured at the instant force is used, not at the moment you first walked in and saw something horrifying.
The first degree part of the charge is a separate question, and it is the one Scott’s attorney is actually fighting. First degree murder in Tennessee requires premeditation, meaning the state has to show she formed the intent to kill after reflection, however brief. Prosecutors appear to be building that around something the daughter told police, that she had been frightened seeing her mother with a gun and that her mother had previously said she would shoot any boy she found in the house. That statement, made before the night in question, is the kind of thing a prosecutor uses to argue a plan existed.
Scott’s attorney Blake Ballin is arguing the opposite, that this was raw emotion rather than calculation, and told NewsNation the prior statement will not hurt his client because juries understand that parents are protective of their children. His framing of the whole case has been that a jury will have to decide whether anyone could act rationally in that circumstance. He described what she walked into as the worst nightmare of any parent of a 13 year old girl.Read that strategy closely and you can see where it is pointed. Ballin is not really arguing that Scott committed no crime. He is arguing about which crime. If a jury accepts that she acted in the heat of passion under adequate provocation, first degree murder collapses into voluntary manslaughter, which in Tennessee carries a range of three to fifteen years instead of life. That is a very different outcome than the acquittal most people commenting on this story assume is coming.
The neighborhood itself is split in a way that tracks the online argument. Gloria Milon told WMC that Scott seemed like a nice woman and that it hurts knowing someone was in there with one of her girls. Another neighbor who did not want to be named told the station she would have called police from the car after seeing him on the doorbell camera and let officers make the arrest when she got home.
There is one more piece of this that the criminal case will never address. A 20-year-old hiding under a 13-year-old’s bed at 1:40 in the morning is not a gray area in Tennessee. It is a crime, and depending on what investigators found it could have been a very serious one. Nobody will be prosecuted for it, because the only person who could have been is dead. Even a man who knew Morton and spoke about the case said he does not condone a 20-year-old getting involved with a 13-year-old, while adding that he wishes people understood the young man he knew.
None of that becomes a defense for Scott, and that mismatch is what makes the Memphis mom shooting case sit so badly with people. The thing that provoked her will go unpunished, and the thing she did in response is the only conduct a courtroom will judge. Her attorney’s real argument is not that the law is on her side. It is that twelve people from Memphis will be asked what they would have done at 1:40 in the morning, and that the answer will not be the one written in the statute.
