Eaker v. State
| Decision Date | 29 November 2022 |
| Docket Number | S22A0875 |
| Parties | EAKER v. THE STATE |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
After a jury trial in October 2018, Darrell Eaker was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in connection with the shooting death of Audra Eaker.[1] Eaker raises two claims of error on appeal:
that (1) Eaker received constitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel; and (2) the trial court erred in denying Eaker's motion for new trial on the basis of newly discovered evidence. For the reasons explained below we affirm.
1. Eaker does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions. As such, we review only the evidence presented at trial that is relevant to Eaker's enumerations of error and any factual background needed to provide context for them.[2]That evidence included the following. Eaker and Audra had been married for 23 years and began experiencing marital issues in 2016 partly due to Eaker's alcohol use and his suspicion that Audra was engaged in infidelity. During this period, the couple had several serious arguments, including one in which Eaker waved a gun in front of Audra and several which involved physical altercations.
On December 27, 2016, the couple attended a party and arrived around 7:00 p.m. At the party, Eaker paced around, walked in and out of the house several times, seemed nervous and very talkative, and continued to drink throughout the night before Audra stopped him. Eaker and Audra left in her car, with Audra driving and Eaker in the passenger seat. Eaker testified in his defense at trial and stated the following. During the car ride back to their home, Audra told Eaker she felt embarrassed at the party because "[he was] acting weird, everybody was asking is [he] okay." At approximately 9:30 p.m., while driving along Highway 92 in Cherokee County, Audra told him he had embarrassed her for the last time, and "[s]he said, we're done we're getting a divorce." Eaker accused her of having an extramarital affair. According to Eaker, Audra owned an H&K .45-caliber handgun that was in the car's glovebox that night.
Eaker removed it, racked the slide, and put it to his own head, closing his eyes. Audra admitted to having and wanting to continue an affair. In response, Eaker "pulled the trigger," and when he opened his eyes, Audra's body was slumped over and bleeding. Eaker added, The Eakers' car came to a stop in the middle of Highway 92. A witness whose car stopped behind theirs testified that she saw "a very bloody woman" inside the car. Eaker got out of the car and said, in an "[e]erily calm" manner, "I've done something really wrong and I'm going to jail for a very long time."
Officers responded to the scene shortly thereafter. They found Audra dead inside her car. The car had "four projectile holes in the driver's-side front door," and a gun was on the passenger side floorboard. Audra's wounds were "consistent with five different gunshot wounds," and a GBI forensic pathologist testified at trial that Audra "died of multiple gunshot wounds of the head." Evidence introduced at trial showed that the gun had an empty eight-round magazine, no bullet in the chamber, and the safety was off. A GBI agent testified that the gun's hammer was set to be ready to fire, and it was semiautomatic, meaning one bullet leaves the chamber for each pull of the trigger. Eaker was arrested at a nearby parking lot where he was found smelling of alcohol and slurring his speech. Gunshot residue on his hands matched the gun from the car's floorboard.
2. Eaker contends his trial counsel rendered constitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to investigate the possibility that the gun used in the shooting accidentally fired multiple times and for not presenting the defense of accident to the jury.[3] His claim fails, however, because he has not shown that his counsel's performance was deficient.
(a) As background, in Eaker's amended motion for new trial, he argued that he received ineffective assistance because trial counsel failed to properly examine the gun used in Audra's shooting and present accident as an alternative theory. Eaker asserted that "[i]t was well known that [he] 'tinkered' with his guns" and that "[l]ogically, any instrument can be assumed subject to malfunction if improperly assembled or modified." Eaker also asserted that evidence showed the sequence of bullets discharged from the gun was arced, which could have been the result of it becoming uncontrollable and "discharging repeatedly" from a single trigger pull. Eaker argued trial counsel improperly limited his investigation, never considering alternative theories such as a possible gun malfunction.
At the hearing on Eaker's motion, trial counsel testified that he had 21 years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer working on murder cases and on jury trials and that he spent hours with Eaker preparing for trial, during which time they discussed the gun. Counsel testified that he reviewed the evidence in the case in preparing for trial and that he did not "recall [Eaker] specifically saying that [the gun] had malfunctioned," had no "definitive memory" of Eaker telling him about disassembling it, and would have had the gun examined if he had received information that its parts had been modified or that it "was prone to misfiring."
Eaker presented testimony from a firearms expert who testified that normally, after emptying a magazine, a handgun's slide will be locked to the rear, and pointed out that the slide of the gun used in the shooting was locked to the forward position. The expert testified that he reviewed the pretrial report from the GBI analyst and that the report did not document "any kind of alteration to the weapon." The expert testified that he field-stripped the gun and "looked inside the internal mechanism of the weapon itself." He noted a possible modification to the gun's hammer and "trigger assembly" due to the relative shininess of the parts, but testified that it did not malfunction at all during his field test. He also testified that misassembling a handgun could cause it to "slamfire," meaning it would fire multiple times with a single pull of the trigger. But on cross-examination, he acknowledged that, although he had testified on direct examination that the gun "may be altered in some way," he was "not sure if it actually ha[d] been altered."
A GBI expert who examined the gun during pretrial investigations testified at the hearing that the gun's safety and hammer appeared unaltered, its parts were functioning, the field tests he conducted never produced a misfire, and no one had suggested during the investigation that it had been altered. The GBI expert also testified that a handgun that had malfunctioned before would continue to do so and would not operate normally later.
(b) To establish ineffective assistance of counsel, a defendant must show that his trial counsel's performance was professionally deficient and that he was prejudiced by this deficient performance. See Sullivan v. State, 308 Ga. 508, 510 (842 S.E.2d 5) (2020) (citing Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 (104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674) (1984)). "If an appellant fails to meet his or her burden of proving either prong of the Strickland test, the reviewing court does not have to examine the other prong." Bates v. State, 313 Ga. 57, 63 (867 S.E.2d 140) (2022) (citation and punctuation omitted).
To establish deficient performance, a defendant must show that his attorney "performed at trial in an objectively unreasonable way considering all the circumstances and in the light of prevailing professional norms." Romer v. State, 293 Ga. 339, 344 (745 S.E.2d 637) (2013). This requires a defendant to overcome "the strong presumption that counsel's performance fell within a wide range of reasonable professional conduct, and that counsel's decisions were made in the exercise of reasonable professional judgment." Simmons v. State, 299 Ga. 370, 375 (788 S.E.2d 494) (2016) (citation and punctuation omitted). A defendant attempting to carry his burden "must show that no reasonable lawyer would have done what his lawyer did, or would have failed to do what his lawyer did not." Davis v. State, 299 Ga. 180, 183 (787 S.E.2d 221) (2016). "In particular, decisions regarding trial tactics and strategy may form the basis for an ineffectiveness claim only if they were so patently unreasonable that no competent attorney would have followed such a course." Id. (citation and punctuation omitted).
To establish prejudice, a defendant must show a reasonable probability that, but for trial counsel's deficiency, the result of the trial would have been different. See Patterson v. State, 314 Ga. 167, 171 (875 S.E.2d 771) (2022). "A reasonable probability is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome." Sullivan, 308 Ga. at 510 (citation and punctuation omitted). "[T]his burden is a heavy one." Bates, 313 Ga. at 62-63 (citation and punctuation omitted).
Eaker argues that trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective for failing to properly investigate the gun used in Audra's shooting and for failing to raise the defense that that the gun accidentally misfired multiple times based on a single pull of the trigger. However, Eaker has failed to show that trial counsel acted objectively unreasonably in failing to investigate this defense. To begin, and contrary to Eaker's assertion in his brief, there was no evidence presented at the motion-for-new-trial hearing or at trial that it was "well known that Mr. Eaker 'tinkered' with his guns."[4]Moreover Eaker's expert testified at that hearing that the GBI's pretrial...
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