Hood v. State

• Decision Date: 10 August 2020
• Docket Number: S20A0725
• Citation: 309 Ga. 493,847 S.E.2d 172
• Parties: HOOD v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

309 Ga. 493

847 S.E.2d 172

HOOD

v.The STATE.

S20A0725

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: August 10, 2020

Clark & Towne, Jessica R. Towne, for appellant.

Daniel J. Porter, District Attorney, Lee F. Tittsworth, Daniel Sanmiguel, Assistant District Attorneys; Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula K. Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Alex M. Bernick, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

McMillian, Justice.

A jury found Appellant Diara Hood guilty of the felony murder of Steven Carden, the aggravated assault of Thomas Smith, and other related crimes.¹ Following the trial court's denial of her motion for new trial, Hood appeals, arguing that the trial court erred by admitting other acts evidence and by charging the jury on that evidence. Although we conclude that the trial court committed two merger errors at sentencing, we otherwise affirm her convictions.

1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the jury's verdict, the evidence presented at trial showed that Hood used herself as bait to lure Carden and Smith to a location in Gwinnett County on the pretext that she would sell Carden drugs or engage in a sexual encounter with him. Instead, Hood set up Carden and Smith to be ambushed and robbed by Tyler Estrada and Jovian Lanus, her co-indictees.

At 7:00 a.m. on July 29, 2013, Gwinnett County Police responded to a call reporting a suspicious person in the parking lot of an apartment complex. When the responding officer arrived on scene, he located Carden, who was dead as a result of a gunshot wound below his right eye and had also sustained a broken nose, and Smith, who was disoriented and had blood on his face and an injury to his left ear.²

At trial, Smith testified that in the early morning hours of July 29, he and Carden, who were both under the influence of a variety of drugs, briefly visited a strip club and then drove to a nearby bar. While Smith waited in his car, Carden went inside the bar to see if any seating was available. About 20 minutes later, Carden returned to the car with a bag of cocaine that he had purchased from Hood. Carden asked Smith to drive him to meet Hood; according to Smith, "[T]hey had made a deal, and [Carden] asked me would I take him to meet her to – for ... services." Following directions from Hood, whom Carden both texted and called, Smith drove north to Gwinnett County and briefly pulled into the parking lot of a closed convenience store on South Norcross-Tucker Road.³ As he was driving out of the parking lot, Smith was stopped by a Gwinnett County Police Department officer for driving without headlights. The officer administered a sobriety test, which Smith passed. A second officer, with a background in drug recognition, was called to the scene around 5:00 a.m. to administer another set of tests, which were inconclusive. However, the officers would not allow Smith to drive away because they suspected that Smith was under the influence of drugs; Carden had been drinking and could not drive. The officers had Smith call a family member for a ride and then left after taking Smith's car keys.

Smith testified that he and Carden then looked for somewhere to wait for their ride, which was approximately 45 minutes away, finally settling on standing by a dumpster near the road. However, they decided that remaining in such a visible position was not a good idea, so they elected to walk around a nearby apartment complex. Carden continued texting Hood while they walked, but Smith did not know what the texts concerned.

Upon returning to the front of the complex, Carden and Smith encountered two men wearing hoodies and hats. The evidence presented at trial showed that the men were Lanus and Estrada. Lanus and Estrada asked Smith and Carden to follow them down a dark street to see something, but Smith declined and, pulling Carden with him, began to walk back toward the dumpster. Carden was still communicating with Hood on his phone. The next thing Smith could recall was waking up in the apartment complex's parking lot as paramedics loaded him into an ambulance. Both Smith's and Carden's cell phones, as well as Carden's wallet, were missing.

Records from Carden's phone showed multiple communications on July 29 with a phone number that investigators linked to Hood. At 2:59 a.m., Carden texted "OK almost there," and at 3:08 a.m., he texted, "At shell one on the ritd [sic]." And in the three hours before his death, Carden continued to make and receive 27 calls and numerous text messages to and from the same number. Carden's final call with Hood ended at 6:09 a.m., which investigators pinpointed as the time of his death. Phone logs for the number linked to Hood showed both that Hood was in regular contact with Lanus during the same time in which she was in contact with Carden and that she called Lanus immediately after her final call with Carden ended.

A shell casing recovered from the crime scene also linked Hood and her co-indictees to the shooting. An investigating detective testified that a Glock handgun with an extended magazine and missing sights was recovered from a juvenile suspect in an unrelated armed robbery attempt that occurred about two weeks after the shooting. The juvenile identified Lanus's address as the location where he had acquired the handgun, and ballistics testing showed that the shell casing recovered from the parking lot where Carden was shot was ejected from the Glock.⁴ Pictures posted to Hood's Facebook profile two weeks before the crimes showed her holding a Glock handgun outfitted with an extended magazine and missing its sights, similar to the handgun recovered from the juvenile.

The State also offered into evidence a video recording of Hood's custodial interview with Gwinnett County Police. During the interview, Hood initially denied any involvement in or knowledge of the shooting. After being confronted with the evidence against her, Hood changed her story and claimed that Lanus wanted to rob the men and tried to get Hood to set them up, but Hood refused. She said that Lanus, Estrada (whom she identified as her boyfriend), and some other people went to buy marijuana while she went to meet Carden at a shopping center, but Lanus and the others coincidentally ended up in the same apartment complex where Carden and Smith were walking, at which point Lanus shot Carden. Hood eventually altered her story a third time and confessed that Lanus, Estrada, and some other people overheard Carden at the bar bragging about being wealthy and having a large amount of cash with him. Hood arranged to meet up with Carden later, and when she, Estrada, Lanus, and the others returned to Gwinnett County, they made plans to rob Carden and Smith. Hood claimed that she understood the plan to be that she would meet up with Carden and Smith alone and take their wallets when they were not paying attention. Hood did not explain how Lanus and Estrada located Carden and Smith in the apartment complex and maintained that she was at the shopping center when she heard a gunshot, but she confessed to returning to the crime scene after the shooting and to taking both Carden's and Smith's cell phones as well as Carden's wallet.

Hood told yet another story at trial, claiming that she had no part in formulating or executing the plan to rob Carden and Smith. She pinned the blame on Lanus, who was the shooter, characterizing him as a dangerous person who made the "independent decision" to rob Carden and Smith and to shoot Carden. In support of this defense, Hood offered a somewhat altered account of the events leading up to the shooting than the versions she told during her custodial interview. She testified that after the traffic stop, Carden called her again for directions and mentioned that he had another $4,000 with him; according to Hood, Carden asked her to "get a girl for him ... he wanted to basically have group sex with a girl for him and [Smith] and another guy[.]" Hood, who was at a friend's apartment with several other people, spoke with Carden over speakerphone and was overheard by Estrada and Lanus. Hood claimed that she told Carden to meet her at a shopping center not far from where Smith's car was parked.⁵

Hood testified that when she got off the phone, Lanus proposed that he, Hood, and Estrada rob the men of the money. Hood dismissed the plot as a "bad idea" and sent Lanus and Estrada to pick up marijuana for her at another apartment complex in order to get them to go "a separate way" from where she was meeting Carden. She then drove to the shopping center and parked, remaining inside the car to wait for Carden. While waiting, Hood was on the phone with Carden, who told her that he and Smith had walked to a nearby apartment complex and then began describing the apartment complex to Hood. Hood heard a gunshot, and the line went dead. When Hood went back to the apartment where Estrada and Lanus were waiting, they told her what they had done, and she returned to the crime scene to take Smith's and Carden's cell phones to "slow down the process of [police] finding [her] number and connecting" her to the crimes. She denied taking Carden's wallet. Hood testified that she later sold the Glock handgun used in the shooting and retained the proceeds from the sale, despite claiming that the weapon belonged to Lanus.

Although not enumerated as error by Hood, consistent with this Court's customary practice in murder cases, we have reviewed the record and conclude that, when viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence presented at trial and summarized above was sufficient to authorize a rational jury to find Hood guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes of which she was convicted.⁶ See Jackson v. Virginia , 443 U.S. 307, 319 (III) (B), 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). See also OCGA § 16-2-20 (defining parties to a crime); Powell v. State , 307 Ga. 96, 99 (1), 834 S.E.2d 822 (2019) ("[C]onviction as a...