Hughes v. State

• Citation: 770 S.E.2d 636,296 Ga. 744
• Decision Date: 16 March 2015
• Docket Number: No. S14G0622.,S14G0622.
• Parties: HUGHES v. The STATE.
• Court: Supreme Court of Georgia

296 Ga. 744

770 S.E.2d 636

HUGHES

v.The STATE.

No. S14G0622.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

March 16, 2015.

Allen Matthews Trapp, Jr., Carrollton, Richard C. Hagler, Hagler, Jackson & Walters, Columbus, GA, for Appellant.

Julia Anne Fessenden Slater, Wesley Allen Lambertus, Asst. Dist. Atty., for Appellee.

Opinion

BLACKWELL, Justice.

Under OCGA § 40–5–55(a), a law enforcement officer may insist that a driver involved in a traffic accident resulting in serious injuries or fatalities submit to a test of his blood for the presence of alcohol and drugs, so long as the officer has probable cause to believe that the driver was driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.¹ Hough v. State, 279 Ga. 711, 713(1)(a), 620 S.E.2d 380 (2005). Following a fatal accident in June 2011, officers insisted that Jack Hughes—the driver of a vehicle involved in that accident—submit to a blood test. Hughes did so, but he later was indicted for several crimes in connection with the accident,² and he then moved to suppress the results of the blood test, asserting that the officers were without probable cause to believe that he had been driving under the influence. The trial court granted his motion, and the State appealed. In State v. Hughes, 325 Ga.App. 429, 750 S.E.2d 789 (2013), the Court of Appeals reversed, although three of its judges dissented. We issued a writ of certiorari to review the decision of the Court of Appeals, and although we find that the Court of Appeals applied the wrong standard of review, we conclude that it nevertheless reached the right result. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

1. We start with the standard of review. As the trial court considered the motion to suppress, it heard from three law enforcement officers, each of whom testified about the things he saw and heard at the scene of the accident, things that eventually led the officers to insist that Hughes submit to a blood test. Hughes presented no evidence of his own at the evidentiary hearing, although his lawyers did subject the officers to cross-examination. In its order granting the motion to suppress, the trial court expressly made findings about many—but not all—of the facts to which the officers had testified. By these findings, the trial court accepted several facts to which the officers had testified, including that they observed at the scene of the accident that Hughes seemed drowsy, that he may have been unsteady on his feet, that his eyes were red and glassy, and that he had a number of pills on his person. The trial court did not expressly reject any fact to which the officers had testified, and the trial court made no explicit findings about their credibility. Nevertheless, there were facts to which the officers had testified about which the trial court said nothing at all. For instance, one officer testified that Hughes had dilated pupils, but the trial court did not mention dilation in its order. Likewise, one officer testified that Hughes was hesitant in response to questions from the officers, but the trial court said nothing in its order about hesitation or evasiveness.

On appeal, a majority of the Court of Appeals declined to limit its analysis to the facts expressly found by the trial court, and the majority undertook instead to decide for itself what additional facts might be gleaned from the evidentiary record. See Hughes, 325 Ga.App. at 430–431, 750 S.E.2d 789. The majority did so, it explained, because the testimony of the officers about such additional facts was not disputed by any affirmative evidence to the contrary, and the trial court had not explicitly rejected those additional facts. See id. at 432, 750 S.E.2d 789. The majority admitted that the trial court would have been entitled to reject the testimony of the officers on credibility grounds, even in the absence of other evidence contradicting their testimony, but the majority noted that the trial court had said nothing in its order about credibility. See id. In separate dissents, Judge Miller and Presiding Judge Barnes argued that the majority had not been deferential enough to the prerogative of the trial court to find the disputed facts on a motion to suppress.³ See id. at 434–435, 750 S.E.2d 789 (Miller, J., dissenting); id. at 439, 750 S.E.2d 789 (Barnes, P.J., dissenting). About the standard of review, the dissenting judges were right.

When the facts material to a motion to suppress are disputed, it generally is for the trial judge to resolve those disputes and determine the material facts. See Tate v. State, 264 Ga. 53, 54(1), 440 S.E.2d 646 (1994) (“[W]hen a motion to suppress is heard by the trial judge, that judge sits as the trier of facts.”). This principle is a settled one, and this Court has identified three corollaries of the principle, which limit the scope of review in appeals from a grant or denial of a motion to suppress in which the trial court has made express findings of disputed facts.⁴ First, an appellate court generally must accept those findings unless they are clearly erroneous.⁵ State v. Hargis, 294 Ga. 818, 823 n. 12 (2), 756 S.E.2d 529 (2014). Second, an appellate court must construe the evidentiary record in the light most favorable to the factual findings and judgment of the trial court. Brown v. State, 293 Ga. 787, 803(3)(b)(2), 750 S.E.2d 148 (2013). And third, an appellate court generally must limit its consideration of the disputed facts to those expressly found by the trial court.⁶ See Miller v. State, 288 Ga. 286, 287(1), 702 S.E.2d 888 (2010) (“[W]e must focus on the facts found by the trial court in its order, as the trial court sits as the trier of fact.” (Emphasis in original)).

The approach employed in this case by the majority of the Court of Appeals is inconsistent with the second and third corollaries. Although the majority accepted the express findings of the trial court, it supplemented those findings with additional findings of its own, and as it searched the record for additional facts to find, the majority failed to view the record in the light most favorable to the findings and judgment of the trial court. For instance, the majority found that Hughes had dilated pupils and was evasive in his responses to questions from the officers, even though the trial court said nothing about such things in its order. See Hughes, 325 Ga.App. at 430, 750 S.E.2d 789. We do not know—and the majority of the Court of Appeals could not have known—exactly why the trial court said nothing about these things. But we do know that the trial court could have assigned no weight at all to the testimony of the officers about these things to the extent that it found that their testimony was not credible.⁷ See Tate, 264 Ga. at 56(3), 440 S.E.2d 646 (“Credibility of witnesses and the weight to be given their testimony is a decision-making power that lies solely with the trier of fact. The trier of fact is not obligated to believe a witness even if the testimony is uncontradicted and may accept or reject any portion of the testimony.” (Citation omitted)). We usually assume that trial judges have done their job, and especially where, as here, the trial court has made extensive findings of fact, we generally must presume that the absence of a finding of a fact that would tend to undermine the conclusion of the trial court reflects a considered choice to reject the evidence offered to prove that fact, especially where there were grounds upon which the trial court properly could have assigned no weight to such evidence. The majority of the Court of Appeals failed to indulge such a presumption, and by so failing, it went astray in its analysis.

2. Limiting our consideration of the disputed facts to those found expressly by the trial court, we conclude that the majority of the Court of Appeals reached the right result, notwithstanding its misapplication of the standard of review. In its order, the trial court found these material facts:

• Hughes was one of two drivers involved in an accident;

• The other driver died of injuries sustained in the accident;• Officers responded to the scene of the accident around 5:30 on the morning of June 27, 2011;

• No officer conducted field sobriety tests to ascertain whether Hughes was under the influence of alcohol or drugs;

• The officers observed that Hughes appeared to be sleepy, had “glassy eyes with some redness,” and “may have been unsteady on his feet”;

• The officers arrested Hughes at the scene for running a red light and vehicular homicide in the second degree;

• Upon arresting Hughes for those offenses, the officers searched his person and found “some tightly packaged pills, which they could not immediately identify”; and

• Following the discovery of these pills, an officer read the implied consent warning to Hughes.

For purposes of this appeal, we accept that these findings of fact are supported by the evidence and not, therefore, clearly erroneous. Because Hughes conceded in connection with his motion to suppress that the officers had probable cause to arrest him at the scene for running a red light and vehicular homicide in the second degree, we also accept—as facts necessarily implied by that concession of probable cause and, therefore, undisputed for purposes of the motion to suppress—that the officers knew as a result of their investigation that Hughes probably had driven through a red light and thereby caused the accident in which another driver sustained fatal injuries. See note 4, supra. Altogether, the undisputed facts and the disputed facts found by the trial court establish that the officers in this case had probable cause to believe that Hughes had been driving under the influence of drugs.

As the United States Supreme Court has explained, “probable cause” means:

[F]acts and circumstances within the officer's knowledge that are sufficient to warrant a prudent person, or one of reasonable caution, in believing, in the circumstances shown, that the suspect has committed, is committing, or

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