Hamilton v. State

• Decision Date: 01 June 2020
• Docket Number: S20A0483
• Citation: 843 S.E.2d 840,309 Ga. 1
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court
• Parties: HAMILTON v. The STATE.

309 Ga. 1

843 S.E.2d 840

HAMILTON

v.The STATE.

S20A0483

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: June 1, 2020

Benjamin David Goldberg, The Law Office of Ben Goldberg, LLC, P.O. Box 427, Mableton, Georgia 30126, Attorneys for the Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Ashleigh Dene Headrick, Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Daniel J. Porter, District Attorney, Lee Franklin Tittsworth, A.D.A., Daniel Sanmiguel, A.D.A., Robby Alexander King, A.D.A., Gwinnett County District Attorney's Office, 75 Langley Drive, Lawrenceville, Georgia 30046, Attorneys for the Appellee.

Boggs, Justice.

At a 2018 jury trial, Rodney Hamilton was convicted of felony murder based upon aggravated battery, arising out of the death of his three-year-old adopted daughter, Tamia. He appeals, asserting insufficiency of the evidence and error in the admission of expert testimony from Dr. Mary Case regarding Tamia's brain injury

. For the reasons stated below, we affirm.¹

1. Construed in the light most favorable to the jury's verdicts,² the evidence presented at trial showed that Hamilton was a stay-at-home husband and father with two sons and two adopted daughters, who were his biological nieces. At approximately 4:25 p.m. on Friday, January 30, 2015, a 911 operator received a call from Hamilton, who reported that Tamia was unconscious. Hamilton did not call 911 immediately upon discovering Tamia. He called his wife at 4:08 and 4:10 p.m., but she did not answer, and although she did not call him back until 4:21 p.m., he did not call 911 in the intervening time. Hamilton was on the phone with his wife for 2 minutes and 43 seconds and only then called 911.

Emergency medical personnel were dispatched at 4:26 p.m. and arrived approximately 3 minutes later. Hamilton met the EMT at the door and told him that Tamia "wouldn't wake up." The EMT went upstairs and made an "extremely quick assessment" of Tamia. She was lying on her back, her jaw was clenched, she was biting her tongue

, and her pupils were unreactive to light, which indicated to the EMT that there was "not a whole lot of brain activity." Her body was limp except for her clenched jaw, and her skin was pale blue. Upon questioning, Hamilton indicated that Tamia had fallen and hit her head four days earlier but had been acting normally. Based on Tamia's condition, the EMT carried Tamia to the ambulance to administer an IV and oxygen and transported her to the Gwinnett Medical Center. On the way to the hospital, Tamia's color improved with the administration of oxygen, but as the ambulance arrived at the hospital, she began "posturing," a condition in which the limbs stiffen involuntarily, indicating an absence of brain activity or lack of oxygen to the brain. At the hospital, doctors inserted a breathing tube, administered anti-seizure medication, and performed a CT scan of Tamia's head.

Tamia was airlifted to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Scottish Rite Hospital. Dr. Greg Melnikoff, the treating emergency room physician at Scottish Rite, determined that the earlier CT scan

showed catastrophic damage to Tamia's brain. Tamia had a large subdural hematoma from a torn vein that caused her brain to shift inside her skull; the hematoma caused an "infarction," or brain death, in part of the brain due to interrupted blood flow. The CT scan also showed a missing ventricle from damage and blood accumulation, as well as an uncal herniation, which occurs when swelling forces the brain stem out of the skull through the small opening at the spinal column. Dr. Melnikoff concluded that Tamia's injuries were so severe that there was very little that could be done to help her. A craniectomy did not improve Tamia's condition, and she was kept on life support for six days so that her organs could be donated before her death on February 5.

Dr. Melnikoff testified that Tamia's injury was a "major force injury ... something massive" and that Tamia could not have been behaving normally after it occurred. The lack of external injuries was not unusual, in Dr. Melnikoff's opinion, as Tamia's injury was consistent with a "very rapid acceleration and deceleration or kind of rotational force" injury – for example, a fall from a second-story railing to the floor below, or a car crash in which a person was wearing a seatbelt but suffered rapid deceleration. Dr. Melnikoff testified that nothing that Hamilton told him about Tamia's history, including his report that "about a week earlier she had fallen down ... a flight of stairs," explained her severe injury and that it would be abnormal for Tamia to have suffered this type of injury, be fine for a week, and then have a sudden onset of symptoms. He acknowledged that rebleeding of an old bleed could occur but explained that rebleeding was generally asymptomatic and non-life-threatening and would not produce severe symptoms without "a new, separate event."

Dr. Melnikoff was the first physician to speak with Hamilton at Scottish Rite, and he testified that their conversation seemed so unusual to him that he made a record of it. Instead of asking how Tamia was doing, as most parents did in such circumstances, Hamilton immediately launched, unsolicited, into a detailed account of everything that had happened since Tamia allegedly fell down the stairs. Dr. Melnikoff had to interrupt Hamilton to talk to him about Tamia's condition, and Hamilton did not interact with, question, or comment on the doctor's explanation about how critical her condition was. The doctor testified that he had never seen anyone react to bad news in this "flat" and emotionless way, and he felt that Hamilton's reaction was "kind of off." As a result of Hamilton's odd behavior and lack of a reasonable explanation for Tamia's severe injury, Dr. Melnikoff referred Tamia's case to the hospital's child abuse team.

Dr. Tamika Bryant, a Scottish Rite physician specializing in child abuse pediatrics, examined Tamia and reviewed her medical records in response to the request from Dr. Melnikoff. She concluded that Tamia's injury was caused by "a violent, very significant force" to her head. Hamilton's account that Tamia was behaving normally when he laid her down for her nap at 1:45 p.m. and was suddenly in critical condition two hours later did not make sense to Dr. Bryant, "without any sort of intervening event happening." In her opinion, a fall down the stairs a week earlier could not have produced the traumatic effects noted if the child were acting normally two hours earlier. Dr. Bryant also did not believe that Tamia's brain injury

was due to "rebleeding" of an older injury, which is typically not life-threatening.

Dr. Carol Terry, the chief medical examiner for Gwinnett County, performed the autopsy on Tamia's body and prepared specimens of brain, eye, and spinal cord tissue for microscopic examination. Dr. Terry noted no external injuries or injuries to the spine

or neck. She observed swelling of the brain and consequent brain death due to deprivation of blood flow and oxygen, hemorrhaging in the retinas, and a torn area of the retina, consistent with trauma. Dr. Terry saw no evidence of a chronic bleed with an acute component. She concluded that Tamia suffered a traumatic head injury and closed head trauma, either through impact or inertia, and that her death was a homicide. Like Dr. Melnikoff and Dr. Bryant, Dr. Terry concluded that Tamia's injuries were inconsistent with either a fall down a staircase, as Hamilton claimed, or any other sort of incident, including a fall, occurring a week prior to symptoms developing. Dr. Terry also concluded that Hamilton's story that Tamia was fine when put down for a nap and later woke up in a tremendously deteriorated state was not a reasonable explanation for Tamia's brain injuries.

Dr. Mary Case, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who testified for the State at Hamilton's trial, stated that she reviewed Tamia's file, including all her medical records from birth forward and all other records associated with the case. She testified to the presence of hemorrhages in Tamia's brain and eyes, which Dr. Case said were typical of injuries inflicted by "very severe" forces on the head. Dr. Case also tested the brain sections preserved by the medical examiner with a "beta amyloid precursor protein stain" ("BAPP stain") to look for damaged "axons" or nerve fibers in the brain. Dr. Case testified that with this test, she discovered two types of axonal damage: traumatic and hypoxic (lack of oxygen). The right side of Tamia's brain showed traumatic damage, while the left side showed only hypoxic damage. Based upon all this information, Dr. Case concluded that Tamia suffered a closed-head injury or inertial brain injury

, and that the manner of death was homicide. She further testified that the BAPP stain procedure was not necessary to make the diagnosis, but illustrated the process of injury. Dr. Case discounted the possibility of "rebleeding" of an older injury. She also testified that the retinal hemorrhages she observed were due to trauma, that Tamia could not have had a "lucid interval" after the fatal injury, and that the injury could not have been caused by a fall down the stairs.

Hamilton testified in his own defense and recounted that Tamia fell down a staircase on January 23 but did not cry and did not appear to be injured. He further testified that on the day of Tamia's fatal injury, nothing seemed to be wrong with her. He stated that when he put her down for her nap she was "weepy and moaning" and did not want to go to sleep, but he convinced her to take a nap. Hamilton said that when he went to wake her after the two older children returned from school, he saw that she had one arm in the air, was biting her tongue

, and would not wake up. Hamilton stated that he told the doctors on multiple...