Lord v. State

• Decision Date: 09 October 2018
• Docket Number: S18A0959
• Citation: 820 S.E.2d 16,304 Ga. 532
• Parties: LORD v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

304 Ga. 532

820 S.E.2d 16

LORD

v.The STATE.

S18A0959

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: October 9, 2018

Manuel G. Lord, Abbeville, Attorneys for the Appellant.

Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Jason Matthew Rea, Assistant Attorney Genera, Department of Law, Lyndsey Hurst Rudder, Deputy D.A., Marc A. Mallon, Senior A.D.A., Paul L. Howard, Jr., District Attorney, Fulton County District Attorney's Office, Atlanta, Attorneys for the Appellee.

MELTON, Chief Justice.

Following a jury trial, Manuel G. Lord, acting pro se, appeals his conviction for malice murder and related crimes, raising numerous enumerations of error.¹ For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the facts show that Lord, Damion Braithwaite, Dukar Watson, and Anthony Davis were friends who regularly spent time together and used Lord’s vehicle to travel around, as Lord was the only one who owned a car.² The four men later met James Ward, Jr., who joined the group. On February 4, 1996, Lord and his four accomplices conspired to rob Chauncey Fleming, whom Watson already knew. Watson called Fleming from Ward’s home phone to arrange to spend the evening of February 5, 1996 with him. All five accomplices rode to Fleming’s apartment in Lord’s car. Fleming let the five into the apartment, and they proceeded to smoke marijuana and watch television in the living room. At some point, Braithwaite found a gun hidden in the sofa where he was sitting, and he signaled to the others that the robbery should begin.

Fleming was subdued at gunpoint, tied up, gagged, and left on the living room floor. The accomplices then searched the apartment and found Eddie Lee McMillian and Nekeba Turner asleep in the bedroom. McMillian and Turner were pulled out of the bed and onto the floor while the defendants searched for money and valuables. Afterwards, Lord and his accomplices decided to kill Fleming, McMillian, and Turner. They devised a plan in which each accomplice would shoot a victim. That way, one accomplice could not incriminate another without consequences. Davis shot McMillian in the back. Watson shot McMillian in the head. Braithwaite shot Turner in the head. Lord shot Fleming in the head. Ward was the only accomplice who did not shoot one of the victims. The same weapon was used to kill all three victims.

As no fingerprints of potential suspects were found at the scene, the investigation went cold until November 24, 1997. On that day, Detective Strozier received a call from Hafitha Braithwaite Miller, the wife of co-defendant Braithwaite. She provided details of the crime scene that had not been released to the public which she learned from Braithwaite, and she implicated all five accomplices in the murders. Detective Strozier followed up on Miller’s information and learned that Lord and Ward had been arrested by Atlanta police with a gun on February 16, 1996—eleven days after the murders. The weapon was retrieved from police property, and subsequent ballistics testing showed that the gun had been used to murder the victims at Fleming’s apartment.

Both Ward and Davis testified at Lord’s trial, each corroborating the other and providing independent details of the crimes as set forth above. In turn, this accomplice testimony was generally consistent with the information that Miller had learned from her husband, and the testimony of Ward, Davis, and Miller was also consistent with the evidence found at the crime scene.³ Also, Ward testified that he had obtained the murder weapon from Braithwaite following the murders and that Lord was with him when he was arrested with the murder weapon shortly after the triple homicide.⁴

This evidence was more than sufficient to enable the jury to find Lord guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.⁵ Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) ; OCGA § 16-2-20 (parties to a crime).⁶

2. In two related enumerations of error, Lord contends that the trial court erred by allowing Davis’s trial attorney to pretend to participate in jury selection after Davis entered a guilty plea during the jury selection process. We disagree.

The record reveals that Lord and Davis were originally going to be tried together, but Davis pled guilty during the second day of jury selection. Lord then moved for a mistrial and asked to start over with jury selection. Lord argued that the existing venire might draw a negative inference if Davis and his attorney were no longer sitting at the defense table when voir dire resumed. The trial court denied the motion. At the time, counsel for Lord and Davis agreed that, after Davis pled guilty, Davis and his attorney would continue to appear to participate in jury selection so as to not alert the jury to the fact that Davis had entered a plea.⁷

Though Lord’s counsel stated that he was making a motion for mistrial, the reasons he stated for making this motion indicate that, in substance, he was requesting a new jury panel.⁸ See Sharpe v. State, 272 Ga. 684, 687 (5), 531 S.E.2d 84 (2000) ("[T]here is authority for disregarding the nomenclature of a defendant’s premature motion for mistrial when the clear import of the motion is that the jury panel be excused and another panel be made available"). Treating Lord’s request as such a motion for a new jury panel, there was no abuse of discretion in the trial court’s decision to deny it. The corrective measures in this case, to which Lord agreed, succeeded in concealing from the jury for the remainder of voir dire that Davis had pled guilty. Thus, the curative measure was sufficient to ensure that the remainder of the jury selection process was fair to Lord. Lord received a jury "free from even a suspicion of prejudgment or fixed opinion." (Citations and punctuation omitted.) Callaway v. State, 208 Ga. App. 508 (2), 431 S.E.2d 143 (1993). Moreover, only a second alternate was selected during that time period after Davis pleaded guilty, and she did not participate in deliberations. There was nothing inherently prejudicial about this procedure, and, in any event, there is evidence that Lord agreed to it. This enumeration fails.

3. Lord contends that the trial court erred by denying his Batson challenge to the State’s decision to strike two African-American men from the jury panel. See Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986).

The record shows that Lord made a Batson challenge on the basis that the prosecution had used only two strikes and they were both on African-American men. The trial court found that Lord had not made a prima facie case of discrimination, but it still asked the prosecution to give race-neutral reasons for the strikes. The prosecutor explained that (1) Juror 29 knew one of the defense attorneys and had communicated with Lord’s family even after they were pointed out by defense counsel, and (2) Juror 37 had indicated that he believed his brother-in-law had been "railroaded" and wrongfully convicted of murder. The court then reiterated its finding that no prima facie case of discrimination had been made and also found that the State had not struck either of the potential jurors for a discriminatory purpose.

A Batson challenge has three parts:

(1) the opponent of a peremptory challenge must make a prima facie showing of racial discrimination; (2) the proponent of the strike must then provide a race-neutral explanation for the strike; and (3) the court must decide whether the opponent of the strike has proven the proponent’s discriminatory intent.

(Citation and punctuation omitted.) Coleman v. State, 301 Ga. 720, 723 (4), 804 S.E.2d 24 (2017). The question whether the trial court correctly decided that no prima facie showing of racial discrimination had been made is moot in this case because the trial court proceeded to the second step in the Batson analysis. See Hernandez v. New York, 500 U.S. 352, 359 (II) (A), 111 S.Ct. 1859, 114 L.Ed.2d 395 (1991) (plurality) ("Once a prosecutor has offered a race-neutral explanation for the peremptory challenges and the trial court has ruled on the ultimate question of intentional discrimination, the preliminary issue of whether the defendant had made a prima facie showing becomes moot."); Lewis v. State, 262 Ga. 679, 680 (2), (424 S.E.2d 626) (1993) (same).

"At the second step [of a Batson challenge], all that is required is for the proponent of the strike to provide a facially race-neutral explanation for the strike; this explanation need not be ‘persuasive, or even plausible.’ " (Citation omitted; emphasis in original.) Coleman, supra, 301 Ga. at 723 (4), 804 S.E.2d 24. There is no contention in this case that the reasons given by the State were not facially race-neutral.

As the final part of the Batson analysis, the trial court " ‘makes credibility determinations, evaluates the persuasiveness of the strike opponent’s prima facie showing and the explanations given by the strike proponent, and examines all other circumstances that bear upon the issue of racial animosity.’ " (Citation omitted.) Id." ‘A trial court’s finding as to whether the opponent of a strike has proven discriminatory intent is entitled to great deference and will not be disturbed unless clearly erroneous.’ " (Citation omitted.) Woodall v. State, 294 Ga. 624, 627 (3), 754 S.E.2d 335 (2014). Here, the trial court found no discriminatory intent on behalf of the State, and Lord has provided no argument or evidence to overcome the great deference owed to this determination. Therefore, Lord’s contention must fail.

4. Lord maintains that the trial court erred by denying his motion for a mistrial following an outburst from a woman sitting in the courtroom.⁹ The record shows that, when Officer Strozier was testifying about graphic pictures of the crime scene, a disruption occurred in the courtroom. The trial...