Graham v. State
| Decision Date | 08 March 2022 |
| Docket Number | S22A0053 |
| Citation | 313 Ga. 436,870 S.E.2d 424 |
| Parties | GRAHAM v. The STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Rodney Samuel Zell, Zell & Zell, P.C., 1111 Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia 31401, for Appellant.
Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Mark Samuel Lindemann, Assistant Attorney General, Eric Christopher Peters, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Fani T. Willis, District Attorney, Lyndsey Hurst Rudder, Deputy D.A., Juliana Sleeper, A.D.A., Fulton County District Attorney's Office, 136 Pryor Street, 4th Floor, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, for Appellee.
In February 2019, Haleem Graham was tried jointly with Brantley Washington and Chrishon Siders and found guilty of felony murder, home invasion in the first degree, and other crimes in connection with the shooting death of Seine Yale Jackson.1 On appeal, Graham asserts that the evidence was insufficient to sustain his convictions and that he received constitutionally ineffective assistance of trial counsel for failing to object to testimony from a detective that, based on his investigation, he believed that Graham and his co-defendants committed the crimes. We affirm.
Viewed in the light most favorable to the jury's verdicts, the evidence presented at trial with respect to Graham showed that on January 5, 2016, the day before the shooting, Graham, Washington, and Siders arrived together at a Best Western hotel in Walterboro, South Carolina around 1:28 p.m. in a red Pontiac Grand Prix. Hotel surveillance video recordings depicted the vehicle entering the parking lot and three individuals, identified by Detective Scott Berhalter as the defendants, exiting the car. Additional video recordings showed the car leaving the parking lot around 8:21 p.m. that evening. Chris Treadwell, a Taliaferro County2 sheriff's deputy, testified that he conducted a traffic stop on a red Pontiac Grand Prix with South Carolina tags around 11:27 p.m. as it headed to Atlanta and cited Graham, who was driving, for speeding. Two other men were in the vehicle.
Several hours later, at approximately 2:00 a.m., police officers responded to a call of shots fired at a rental unit behind a house on Glen Iris Drive in Fulton County.3 The responding officers found Jackson dead. He had been gagged with a belt and necktie, "hogtied" with extension cords, and shot in the back of the head. Investigation at the scene revealed no signs of forced entry, but Jackson's home appeared to have been ransacked. Officers collected an empty clear jar emitting the odor of fresh marijuana.4 The medical examiner who conducted the autopsy concluded that Jackson suffered wounds consistent with being bound and gagged and that he had died from any one of four gunshots to the head.
Meyonta Murphy testified that when she visited her mother, who lived in another rental unit on the same property on Glen Iris Drive, at approximately 1:45 a.m. on January 6, 2016, she noticed an unfamiliar red Pontiac with two people inside idling in front of the house. As she left her mother's home about ten minutes later, Murphy saw one person remain in the front passenger seat of the car while the other exited the car and passed by her as he walked up the driveway toward the house. Murphy took note of the vehicle's South Carolina license plate number before she left. Soon after, Murphy's mother heard nearby gunshots and called 911. Murphy told investigating officers about her observations of the red Pontiac and the man she encountered, whom she later identified in a photographic line-up as Siders.
Jackson's brother testified that Siders was always asking Jackson to "front" him drugs without payment, but Jackson continued to do business with him because Siders was related to Jackson's uncle. Jackson's friend, Marc Huewitt, testified that Jackson had visited him just hours before the shooting. Jackson told Huewitt that he was planning to meet with a man related to Jackson's uncle later that evening and was "very concerned" because he had a bad feeling about the man.
Detective Scott Demeester, who was qualified as an expert in cell phone data interpretation and cell site analysis, testified regarding data recovered from the defendants’ cell phones. A cell phone number associated with Washington – but identified in Jackson's phone with Siders's nickname – called Jackson's phone on the morning of January 5; after that call ended, the same cell number called Graham's phone. At 6:39 p.m., Washington's phone texted an unidentified phone number, stating, When Washington's phone called Jackson's phone around 7:45 p.m., Washington's phone was near the Best Western hotel before leaving shortly thereafter and traveling in a northwestern direction. At 11:23 p.m., Siders's phone was near Taliaferro County, approximately two hours and thirty minutes from the Best Western. At 11:45 p.m., Washington's phone sent a text to Jackson, stating, "Got a speeding ticket lol." When Washington's phone called Jackson's phone at 1:08 a.m., the phone was near Glen Iris Drive. That call was the last call ever made from Washington's phone. The phone then remained stationary near Interstate 20 in DeKalb County and received numerous calls that went unanswered. Graham's and Siders's phones placed various calls to each other between 1:10 and 1:48 a.m. while they were in the area of Glen Iris Drive. Approximately one hour after the shooting was reported, Siders's phone was on Interstate 20, heading east away from Atlanta. The next time Graham's and Siders's phones were used was in Walterboro on the morning of January 6.
Additional hotel surveillance video showed that the Pontiac entered the Best Western parking lot at 6:20 a.m. on the morning after the shooting and that three men immediately unloaded what appeared to be heavy bags from the Pontiac. The State also introduced into evidence a receipt showing that Graham had checked into a room at the Best Western around 1:28 p.m. on January 5, 2016, and checked out at 10:00 a.m. the following morning.
Siders, the only defendant to testify at trial, told the jury that he and Washington were part of a musical group that Graham managed and that they met in South Carolina on January 5, 2016, to work in a music studio. According to Siders, that evening, they decided to drive to Atlanta for a promotional photo shoot, but Washington stayed at the hotel because he became ill. Siders used to purchase drugs from Jackson, and while he and Graham were in Atlanta, he called Jackson to buy "some smoke." However, Huewitt answered Jackson's phone that evening and told him to come to Jackson's house. Siders claimed that when he arrived, he found Huewitt outside and told him that he wanted "an eighth." Huewitt then responded, before walking away. Siders testified that he then returned to the car and told Graham that Huewitt was "acting really funny just now," and they went to a nearby club where they stayed for a short while before returning to South Carolina.
1. Graham asserts that the circumstantial evidence was insufficient to sustain his convictions. We are not persuaded.
When evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, we view the evidence presented at trial in the light most favorable to the jury's verdict and ask whether any rational trier of fact could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes of which he was convicted. See Jackson v. Virginia , 443 U.S. 307, 309, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). In doing so, this Court does not reweigh the evidence. See Ivey v. State , 305 Ga. 156, 159, 824 S.E.2d 242 (2019). And "[w]e leave to the jury the resolution of conflicts or inconsistencies in the evidence, credibility of witnesses, and reasonable inferences to be derived from the facts." Smith v. State , 308 Ga. 81, 84, 839 S.E.2d 630 (2020).
Under Georgia statutory law, "[t]o warrant a conviction on circumstantial evidence, the proved facts shall not only be consistent with the hypothesis of guilt, but shall exclude every other reasonable hypothesis save that of the guilt of the accused." OCGA § 24-14-6. However, "not every hypothesis is a reasonable one, and the evidence need not exclude every conceivable inference or hypothesis – only those that are reasonable." Graves v. State , 306 Ga. 485, 487, 831 S.E.2d 747 (2019) (emphasis in original; citation and punctuation omitted). And, "[w]here the jury is authorized to find the evidence sufficient to exclude every reasonable hypothesis except that of the accused's guilt, this Court will not disturb that finding unless it is insupportable as a matter of law." Anglin v. State , 312 Ga. 503, 506-07 (1), 863 S.E.2d 148 (2021) (citations and punctuation omitted).
Graham argues that Murphy was the only witness and that she testified that she only saw two people in the Pontiac just before the shooting and that calls between Siders's and Graham's phones around the time of the crimes indicate that Graham was not the second person that Murphy saw. This argument, however, ignores that Washington's fingerprint was found in Jackson's house, which is consistent with Washington being inside the house at the time that Murphy saw the two people in the car, after which one of them exited the car and walked towards the house. Siders's testimony is also consistent with Siders exiting the car to walk towards the house, leaving Graham in the car. And the phone records show that both Graham's and Siders's phones were in the area of Jackson's home around the time of the murder. Based on the evidence as a whole, the jury was authorized to believe that Siders was calling Graham...
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