Hill v. State

• Decision Date: 15 March 1985
• Docket Number: No. 41698,41698
• Citation: 254 Ga. 213,326 S.E.2d 757
• Parties: HILL v. STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

Page 757

326 S.E.2d 757

254 Ga. 213

HILL v. STATE.

No. 41698.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

March 15, 1985.

Rehearing Denied March 28, 1985.

Jack G. Slover, Twitty & Slover, Camilla, for Johnny Frank hill.

H. Lamar Cole, Dist. Atty., James B. Thagard, Asst. Dist. Atty., Moultrie, Michael J. Bowers, Atty. Gen., Eddie Snelling, Jr., for the State.

SMITH, Justice.

Appellant, Johnny Frank Hill, was tried before a Colquitt County jury for theft by taking and the murder of Pearlie Mae Robinson. He was convicted on both counts. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the theft count and life imprisonment for the murder conviction. On appeal, he raises ten enumerations of error. We affirm. ¹

Appellant lived with the victim in an apartment in Moultrie. The victim's father, who lived in the adjoining apartment, heard them talking as he left his apartment to take a walk on the day of the murder. When he returned from his walk, the victim's car was gone and no one answered the victim's doorbell.

The victim's father became curious and entered her apartment. There he found her sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood. She had been beaten and stabbed, and was dead. He ran across the street and called the police.

The police issued a warrant for appellant's arrest and commenced a search for the victim's car. They found the car near appellant's family home in neighboring Mitchell County. The fuel line had been cut, and the front seat had been burned. Appellant subsequently turned himself in to the Mitchell County police.

When appellant was returned to Colquitt County, the authorities there found traces of human blood on the bottom of one of his feet. They had earlier discovered bloody footprints on the floor of the victim's apartment. They also discovered appellant's fingerprints on the victim's car.

The victim's father testified that the victim had asked appellant to move out of the apartment because he had no job and no money. A friend of appellant and the victim testified that the victim and appellant had argued over money the night before the victim's death. The friend also testified that appellant had removed his clothes from the apartment at some point near the time of the victim's death.

1. Appellant raises the general grounds in four separate enumerations of error. The evidence presented at trial authorized a rational trier of fact to find appellant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of murder as charged. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979).

2. In his fourth enumeration, appellant contends that the trial court erred in admitting into evidence duplicative pictures of the victim's battered face, and photographs of the upper portion of the victim's body after it had been washed and placed upon a table prior to an autopsy.

a. The trial court admitted into evidence five photos of the victim's face. Two of the photos were enlargements and two were taken from identical angles at different distances from the victim. These photographs were not pictures of an autopsy but of the crime scene and of the location of the injuries. Brown v. State, 250 Ga. 862, 866, 302 S.E.2d 347 (1983), was not violated here.

b. The trial court also allowed into evidence three black and white photographs of the victim's nude body awaiting an autopsy. Appellant claims that the trial court erred under Brown, supra. In Brown, we were concerned less with suppressing the fact of the autopsy than we were with controlling the orchestration by prosecutors of the victim's body, medical procedures, and photographic technique to produce pictures that would inflame and confuse a jury, obscuring the issue of the defendant's guilt or innocence.

Here, the pre-autopsy photos showed the fatal wounds in the victim's chest. The prosecutor, in addition, muted the gruesome effect of the photographs through the use of black and white film and the manipulation of the camera angle. As the pictures in question showed a material fact and the state used the photographer's skill to reduce, rather than increase the inflammatory effect of the sight of the victim's body, we find these photographs admissible under Brown, supra.

3. Appellant asserts that the trial court erred in admitting fingerprint cards into evidence without a showing of the chain of custody of the cards.

A fingerprint is far from fungible. The value of a fingerprint lies in its unique pattern. A fingerprint card, thus, may be admitted into evidence without the showing of a chain of custody since it can be readily identified by reference to the subject's fingerprints. We find no error. Harper v. State, 251 Ga. 183, 304 S.E.2d 693 (1983).

4. Appellant charges that the trial court erred in allowing the victim's clothes into evidence. We find no error. Evans v. State, 70 Ga.App. 500, 28 S.E.2d 671 (1944).

5. Appellant, in a...