Sams v. State
| Decision Date | 30 June 2022 |
| Docket Number | S22A0305 |
| Parties | SAMS v. The STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Ashleigh Bartkus Merchant, The Merchant Law Firm, P.C., 701 Whitlock Avenue Suite J43, Marietta, Georgia 30064, for Appellant.
Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Paula Khristian Smith, Christopher M. Carr, Kathleen Leona McCanless, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Anita Reynolds Howard, Neil Alan Halvorson, Daniel Patrick Bibler, Macon Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, 2nd Floor, Grand Building 661 Mulberry Street, Macon, Georgia 31201, for Appellee.
In 2015, a Peach County jury found Tevin Sams guilty of the malice murder of eight-year-old Jai'mel Anderson, the aggravated assault of six-year-old J. A., and other offenses. The charges arose out of an incident in which shots were fired through an apartment door into a room occupied by the two boys. Following the denial of his motion for new trial, Sams challenges the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions and argues that the trial court erred by allowing the State to admit evidence pursuant to OCGA § 24-4-404 (b) that Sams shot at someone else in 2014. We affirm.1
1. The evidence presented at trial showed the following.2 Sams, Antonio Garvin, Jeremy Jackson, Dennis Eason, Jr., and Kristian Wipfel were acquainted with one another. All five men were together on January 6, 2015.
At trial, Garvin testified to the following. On the night of the shootings, Garvin, Sams, Jackson, Eason, and Wipfel met at Jackson's apartment in Macon. While they were gathered there, Eason talked about a dispute he had with a man named Dejad Williams, saying "Dejad owed him money" and that "he ran off with some of his marijuana." The five men decided to travel together to Fort Valley to find Williams. The decision to travel to Fort Valley was a "spur of the moment type deal," and Eason wanted to go to Fort Valley "to get his product or his money back from [Williams]."
Katelyn Grandison, Sams's girlfriend at the time, testified that before traveling to Williams's apartment, Sams got a gun at the apartment that the two of them shared and told her that he was going to get some marijuana and "see a transaction." Grandison asked Sams if he was going to drive his car and believed he responded that "they followed him there, or that they were already outside." When asked who "they" were, Grandison said she assumed Sams was referring to Wipfel and Eason.
Garvin testified that Sams and Wipfel rode with Garvin in his car, and Eason rode with Jackson in Jackson's car to Fort Valley. The two cars went all the way to the back of the Indian Oaks apartment complex where Williams lived and then turned back around. Then, the two cars headed "back over to the church parking lot," and Garvin followed Jackson's car. Before the two cars got to the church, the five men saw Williams outside of the "A apartment complex" with a gun.
Garvin then testified that when the two cars arrived at the church parking lot, everyone got out of the cars and started "asking questions." That is when they found out that Eason had been texting Williams. Eason and Williams had been "going back and forth" over text, and "it went to another level, basically."
Williams testified that at first he thought his cousin (who also lived in the Indian Oaks apartment complex) was sending him the text messages. After receiving multiple text messages, Williams went to his cousin's apartment at 1:17 a.m. but then returned to his apartment. Williams then received more threatening texts when he was back at his apartment. At 1:37 a.m., Eason sent Williams a text saying,
Garvin testified that Eason used Garvin's phone to send the text messages to Williams. When the men got out of the cars, Garvin saw that Eason and Sams each had a gun, "but you wouldn't be able to tell if it was on them because of what they were wearing." Eason was wearing "like a bubble jacket," and Sams was wearing a "onesie" which Garvin described as like "an inmate jumpsuit."
Garvin testified that after all five men talked in the church parking lot, Eason and Sams still had their guns, and Eason, Sams, and Wipfel all walked "over through the apartment breezeway." Then Garvin saw Eason walk back towards the cars and heard gunshots as Eason was walking back. The two cars then traveled back to Jackson's apartment. Wipfel told Garvin that Sams shot first through the door and that while Sams was shooting, Wipfel "came back and ... started shooting." Garvin testified that the gun that Wipfel had was Eason's gun. Sams also told Garvin that he and Wipfel shot into the doorway of the apartment.
Jackson, Garvin's cousin, testified to the following. He first saw Eason with a gun when Garvin, Wipfel, and Eason came to his apartment on New Year's Eve. Eason's gun was "silver and black." The first time Jackson heard about an altercation between Eason and "some other guy" was at Jackson's apartment after he went to Zaxby's in Macon with Garvin and Eason on the night of the shootings. The group decided to travel to Fort Valley after Eason discussed his dispute with Williams, and Jackson thought that "it was just going to be like a fight or something like that."
Jackson further testified that Eason got in his car and that he drove to Fort Valley. Eason directed him where to go when they arrived in Fort Valley. When they arrived at the apartment complex, Jackson drove through the entrance and into the complex, then turned around and came out of the complex. While he was driving out, Jackson testified that Eason said, "that's him over there." They then drove around to the side of the complex and parked "by a shed or a dumpster or something like that." Garvin was driving another car with Wipfel and Sams in it, and when both cars parked, Wipfel and Sams got out of the car and Eason went to talk to them. After talking, Eason went back to the car, and Wipfel and Sams went through "a little opening of the gate or something" towards the apartment complex door. Wipfel and Sams then walked back down towards the cars, and then went back towards the apartment complex again. Jackson said he "heard shots" when Wipfel and Sams "went back up" towards the apartment complex. Then they came back towards the cars, and Wipfel got in Garvin's car and Sams got in Jackson's car. After that, Eason said, "go, go drive," and the five men left to go back to Macon.
Jackson testified that when he heard shots, Eason was sitting next to him in his car, Garvin was in his car, and Wipfel and Sams were not there with them in the cars. Jackson testified that Sams had a jacket on when he got back in Jackson's car. Jackson suggested that Sams was covering a gun inside his jacket, but Jackson did not see Sams's gun until the men got back to Jackson's apartment in Macon.
Williams testified that he was taking care of his girlfriend's children, Jai'mel and J. A., who slept at his apartment every night on an air mattress in the living room. Williams testified that he was in his bedroom when the shots were fired and that he crawled to the living room to retrieve Jai'mel and J. A. from the air mattress where they were sleeping. Williams grabbed J. A. off the mattress first. Williams then grabbed the air mattress and began pulling it to get Jai'mel. He could feel that it had gone flat, and he realized Jai'mel had been shot. It was later determined that – although J. A. had not been struck by a bullet – Jai'mel had been shot twice, once in the leg and once in his upper abdomen, which killed him. Williams called 911 and police officers arrived shortly thereafter. Shell casings from a .40-caliber Glock pistol were found at the crime scene. The police later determined that 16 rounds were fired through Williams's door.
At trial, Sams testified that he was with Wipfel, Eason, Jackson, and Garvin on the night of the murder and that he traveled with them to Fort Valley. After arriving at the Indian Oaks apartments and parking at the church, Sams stated that all five men exited the vehicles. Thereafter, according to Sams, Wipfel and Eason went to the apartments while he, Jackson, and Garvin got back into the cars. Sams further claimed that after hearing gunshots, he saw Wipfel and Eason run back to the cars, and that at that moment he saw Eason with a gun for the first time. Additionally, Sams testified that, at one time, he owned a .40-caliber Glock.
2. Sams contends that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to support his convictions. Specifically, Sams argues that there was no evidence that he was a party to the crimes and that the State's only evidence that was alleged to link Sams to the crimes was uncorroborated accomplice testimony.3
When evaluating the sufficiency of evidence as a matter of constitutional due process, the proper standard of review is whether a rational trier of fact could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. See Jackson v. Virginia , 443 U. S. 307, 319 (III) (B), 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). This Court views the evidence in the "light most favorable to the verdict, with deference to the jury's assessment of the weight and credibility of the evidence." (Citation and punctuation omitted.) Hayes v. State , 292 Ga. 506, 506, 739 S.E.2d 313 (2013).
Moreover, "[w]hile proof of a shared criminal intent with the actual...
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