Anderson v. State
| Decision Date | 15 February 2022 |
| Docket Number | S21A0981 |
| Citation | 313 Ga. 178,869 S.E.2d 401 |
| Parties | ANDERSON v. The STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Christina Michelle Kempter, Kempter Law Group, LLC, 3330 Cumberland Blvd, Suite 500, Atlanta, Georgia 30339, for Appellant.
Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Kathleen Leona McCanless, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Deborah D. Wellborn, Shannon E. Hodder, Tauri L. Thomes, Assistant District Attorneys, Sherry Boston, District Attorney, Dekalb County District Attorney's Office, 556 North McDonough Street, Suite 700, Decatur, Georgia 30030, for Appellee.
A DeKalb County jury found Jefferies Anderson guilty of malice murder and other offenses in connection with the shooting death of Jonathan Newton. Following the denial of his motion for new trial, Anderson appeals, arguing that the trial court erred by admitting intrinsic evidence and that his trial counsel provided constitutionally ineffective assistance. We affirm.1
1. The evidence presented at trial showed the following. A video surveillance recording at an apartment complex located on Glenwood Avenue in Fulton County reflected that, just before noon on October 31, 2016, a man wearing a black hat, dark pants, and a gray and white striped shirt and carrying a backpack walked through a parking deck and broke into one of the apartment buildings. Around the same time, someone reported to the police that an unknown man attempted to enter an apartment in that complex. A woman inside the apartment screamed, and the man ran away.
Approximately an hour later and less than a mile away, at a different apartment complex on Metropolitan Avenue in DeKalb County, a man entered one of the apartment buildings, went to the fourth floor, and began knocking on doors of apartments on that floor. Two tenants who lived on the fourth floor saw a young African-American male in the hallway around that time. One of the tenants said the man was wearing a hat.
Just after 1:00 p.m., a resident of the fourth floor heard someone kick in the door of another apartment down the hall. Soon after, Newton, who lived in an apartment on the fourth floor, came back from work for his lunch break with Clay Agee, his neighbor and co-worker. Newton saw that his apartment door had been kicked in, and he quickly went inside and found a man robbing it. Agee, who was standing just outside the door, saw that the assailant was wearing a surgical mask, a backward hat, a gray striped shirt, and black pants. Agee testified that although the top of the man's head and the lower part of his face were covered, he got a "good" and "clear" look at his eyes.
The man looked up, appeared to be surprised, and then reached for a handgun that was tucked into the waistband of his pants. Newton rushed into the apartment toward the man, struggled with him, and tried to wrap his arms around him to keep the gun down. Agee "froze," and Newton told him to "run, get out of here." As Agee turned and ran away, he heard gunshots.
Agee reached the leasing office and learned that a neighbor had already called the police. The police arrived at the apartment complex less than a minute later. When the police reached Newton's apartment, they saw signs of a struggle and found Newton lying dead in the doorway of his apartment. There were also signs of forced entry into the apartment. A gun Newton kept in the apartment, a game console, and a laptop were later reported missing from the apartment.
Inside the apartment, the police located a black knit hat and four spent .38-caliber cartridges. A firearms examiner determined that all of the cartridges had been fired from the same gun and that they were consistent with having been fired from a Colt or Springfield .38-caliber pistol.
The medical examiner testified that Newton suffered multiple gunshot wounds from close range. Newton died from a gunshot wound to his chest, and the wounds were consistent with having been inflicted after a struggle between the shooter and the victim.
Agee was later asked by the police to review video recordings from a security camera on the door of one of the apartments on the fourth floor near Newton's apartment. The video recordings, which were played for the jury, were taken between 12:41 and 1:11 p.m. Two of the recordings showed an African-American male wearing a black hat, a gray and white striped shirt and dark pants and carrying a backpack as he walked back and forth on the fourth-floor hallway. According to a detective who reviewed the recordings, the hat found in Newton's apartment was "similar" to the one seen in the videos. The recording taken at 1:11 p.m. appears to show the man fleeing the fourth floor and running down a nearby stairwell while no longer wearing a hat. After reviewing the videos from the neighbor's door camera, Agee told the police that the man shown in the videos was the man who shot Newton. One detective testified that even though none of the videos clearly showed the man's face, the man shown in the videos taken from the door camera had a "similar description with a similar hat" as the man shown in the surveillance video taken from the Glenwood Avenue apartment complex earlier in the day.
According to one of the detectives, Anderson eventually became a "person of interest." In his investigation, the detective compared a photograph of Anderson with the two videos taken from the Glenwood Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue apartment complexes. The detective testified that Anderson was "similar" to the man shown in the videos in "build, height, [and] physical characteristics." The detective also testified that although the videos were not taken from vantage points that allowed the police to see the suspect's face, the man shown in the videos had characteristics that were "very similar" to Anderson, which led the police to believe it was him shown in the videos.
On November 13, Agee was again interviewed by the police and was asked to view a photographic lineup containing pictures of six men.2 Agee selected a picture of Anderson in the lineup and told the detective that he was about "70 percent" sure that was who he had seen in Newton's apartment. Agee testified that it was the man's eyes that led him to select his photo in the lineup he was shown.
The police collected the black hat that was found in Newton's apartment and sent it to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (‘‘GBI’’) for DNA testing. Following his arrest, the police obtained a buccal swab from Anderson that was also sent to the GBI. The testing showed that the primary DNA recovered from the hat belonged to Anderson.
At trial, Anderson called only one witness, his fiancée, Tilicia Boyd. Boyd testified that she and Anderson were together at her grandmother's house throughout the day on October 31.3 Anderson introduced a photo Boyd took of him and posted to Instagram that day. It was not clear at what time the photo was taken. Anderson and the State stipulated that, prior to the murder, Anderson was convicted of a felony.
2. Anderson first argues that the trial court erred by admitting evidence from the burglary at the Glenwood Avenue apartments as intrinsic evidence. We see no abuse of the discretion in the trial court's admission of the evidence on that basis.
Before trial, the State moved to admit evidence of the Glenwood Avenue burglary. The State asserted in its motion and in a pre-trial hearing that the evidence was intrinsic to the charged offenses or, in the alternative, that the evidence should be admitted under OCGA § 24-4-404 (b) ("Rule 404 (b)") for the limited purpose of showing intent, identity, plan, and scheme on the part of Anderson.4 The trial court ruled that the evidence was intrinsic. The trial court adhered to its ruling when it denied Anderson's motion for new trial, determining that the evidence of the Glenwood Avenue burglary was part of the same series of transactions as the charged offenses, that it was necessary to complete the story of the crime and inextricably intertwined with the evidence regarding the charged offense, and that, along with the testimony of other witnesses, the evidence helped to explain that the intruder was unlikely to be a resident of the apartment complex because he had just attempted another break-in an hour earlier. The trial court also determined that the evidence satisfied the balancing test under OCGA § 24-4-403 ("Rule 403"),5 noting that any prejudice from the introduction of the Glenwood Avenue video was minimal given that the intruder's face was not visible and because Anderson denied that he was the person shown.
(Citations and punctuation omitted.) Brown v. State , 307 Ga. 24, 29 (2), 834 S.E.2d 40 (2019). "There is no bright-line rule regarding how close in time evidence must be to the charged offenses, or requiring evidence to pertain directly to the victims of the charged offenses, for that evidence to be admitted properly as intrinsic evidence." (Citation and punctuation omitted...
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