Suggs v. State

• Decision Date: 15 February 2021
• Docket Number: S20A1093
• Citation: 854 S.E.2d 674,310 Ga. 762
• Parties: SUGGS v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

310 Ga. 762

854 S.E.2d 674

SUGGS v. The STATE.

S20A1093

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: February 15, 2021

Earle Johnston Duncan, III, Attorney At Law, P. O. Box 644, Darien, Georgia 31305, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Matthew Blackwell Crowder, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334-1300, April Marie Hancock, A.D.A., Southern Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, P.O. Box 2490, Moultrie, Georgia 31776-2498, Bradfield M. Shealy, District Attorney, Southern Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, P.O. Box 99, Valdosta, Georgia 31603-0099, for Appellee.

Boggs, Justice.

Appellant Kalvin Tyrone Suggs challenges his 2017 convictions for malice murder and other crimes in connection with the shooting death of Tony Harrison. Appellant contends that the evidence presented at his trial was legally insufficient to support his convictions. He also contends that the trial court erred in denying his pretrial motion regarding voir dire, thereby forcing him to question all the prospective jurors together; rejecting his challenge to an allegedly racially discriminatory peremptory strike; denying his motion in limine to exclude evidence derived from a surreptitious audio recording of a conversation; and admitting 21 crime scene and autopsy photographs. He further contends that the court did not follow the proper procedure when receiving a communication from the jury and that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel. For the reasons that follow, we affirm. ¹

1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence at trial showed the following. On the night of February 28-March 1, 2015, Appellant rode with his friend Patrick Pridgen to the Jackpot Club in the Sunset Plaza shopping center in Moultrie. Appellant was wearing black pants and a black and white shirt. At around 1:30 a.m., Appellant got into a fight with Harrison and Harrison's brother, Dontavious Jackson, and Harrison and Jackson severely beat Appellant. The club's owner, Israel Shaw, helped break up the fight and told his bouncers to clear the club.

As the large crowd spilled into the parking lot, Timothy Davis offered Harrison and Jackson a ride home, and the three men walked to Davis’ car. Tamera Edwards drove up with her boyfriend and parked next to Davis. Harrison was standing between the two cars when gunfire erupted from a 9mm pistol one row over in the parking lot, striking the side of Edwards’ car and shattering her back window. Harrison pulled his own 9mm pistol and returned fire, getting off seven rounds before he was hit in the right upper chest and fell to the ground. The bullet that struck Harrison went through his right lung, windpipe, aorta, and left lung before exiting through his upper left arm. Appellant jumped into a Chevrolet Camaro convertible that his cousin was driving and was dropped off at the Northgate Apartments.

Harrison was pronounced dead at the scene. Law enforcement officers recovered two sets of 9mm shell casings from the parking lot – seven shell casings from around and under Harrison's body that matched the pistol lying by his left foot, and 12 shell casings nearby that were fired from a different 9mm pistol, which was never found.

At around 3:00 a.m. on March 1, 2015, Appellant called Pridgen, and Pridgen picked him up at the Northgate Apartments. At Appellant's request, Pridgen drove Appellant to Appellant's sister's house in the Atlanta area, dropping him off at around 6:30 a.m. before driving back to Moultrie. The next day, Appellant called Pridgen, who drove to Atlanta, picked up Appellant, and brought him back to Moultrie. Both on the way up to Atlanta and on the way back to Moultrie, Appellant told Pridgen that he was in the parking lot "ducking and shooting" after the club shut down on the night that Harrison was shot.

On the afternoon of March 3, Kaysha Trim agreed to meet with GBI agents at a cemetery in Moultrie to discuss the shooting. In an audio-recorded interview, which was later played for the jury, Trim told the agents that she knew Appellant and that she saw Harrison and Jackson beat him up inside the club. Trim said that after the club closed, she was in the parking lot walking to her car when she saw Appellant, who was standing near her car, fire multiple shots in Harrison's direction and saw Harrison fall to the ground.

Later that afternoon, Appellant contacted the GBI to make a statement. Appellant told agents that Harrison and Jackson beat him up inside the club and that he passed two police officers on his way out but did not report the fight to them. ² Appellant claimed that he was walking toward Pridgen's car when the shooting started, that he ran to the other end of the parking lot, and that someone he did not know picked him up in a black truck and drove him to his ex-girlfriend's house, where he stayed in seclusion in a shed in her backyard for the next two days without her knowledge. Appellant said that when he left the shed, he went to his parents’ house, where he was notified that law enforcement was requesting to speak with him. Appellant could not describe the individual who picked him up or the truck (beyond the fact that it was black), he did not know how the driver knew to take him to his ex-girlfriend's house, and his description of the inside of the shed did not match what GBI agents found when they searched it after the interview ended. Appellant turned over khaki pants and a red shirt that he claimed he was wearing at the time of the shooting.

On March 5, the GBI received cell phone tower location records for Appellant's and Pridgen's phones. During an interview with Pridgen, GBI agents confronted him with the records, and Pridgen admitted that he drove Appellant to Atlanta after the shooting and brought him back to Moultrie the next day. Pridgen agreed to go speak with Appellant and record him with a device provided by the GBI. Shortly after 5:00 p.m., Pridgen went to the home of one of Appellant's relatives and spoke to Appellant, who asked Pridgen what he told the GBI and whether the GBI asked him about a gun. Appellant told Pridgen to contact the GBI and say that he lied about taking Appellant to Atlanta after the shooting and that he instead took someone else who had Appellant's phone. An audio recording of the conversation was later played for the jury.

At 7:06 p.m. on March 5, Appellant was riding with his father in his father's truck when a GBI agent conducted a traffic stop and arrested Appellant. During a search of the truck, the agent found a loaded firearm in the passenger-side door compartment next to where Appellant was sitting, which Appellant, as a convicted felon, was not allowed to possess.

Appellant contends that the evidence was legally insufficient to support his convictions. When viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, however, the evidence presented at trial and summarized above was sufficient as a matter of constitutional due process to authorize a rational jury to find Appellant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes for which he was convicted. See Jackson v. Virginia , 443 U.S. 307, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). See also Vega v. State , 285 Ga. 32, 33, 673 S.E.2d 223 (2009) (" ‘It was for the jury to determine the credibility of the witnesses and to resolve any conflicts or inconsistencies in the evidence.’ " (citation omitted)).

2. Appellant contends that the trial court erred in denying his pretrial motion to conduct individual voir dire of the prospective jurors one-by-one or, alternatively, in panels of 12 at a time, thereby forcing him to conduct individual voir dire of all the prospective jurors together. Appellant relies on Lahr v. State , 239 Ga. 813, 238 S.E.2d 878 (1977), where this Court stated that "voir dire questions are propounded to panels of 12 and defendant can question them in panels of 12 or individually but not en masse to the entire group of 48 jurors at one time." Id. at 814, 238 S.E.2d 878.

The trial transcript shows that the court divided the prospective jurors into groups of 12 and sat them in separate locations in the courtroom for voir dire. After the jury had been selected and the remaining prospective jurors were excused, Appellant complained that the court denied him the right to conduct individual voir dire with panels of 12 prospective jurors at a time. The court replied, "You did have that right, sir, you could have done it if you wanted to. They were sitting in panels of 12, if I'm not mistaken. Is that not true? I intentionally sat them in groups of 12," and Appellant acknowledged that the jurors were sitting in panels of 12. In its order denying Appellant's new trial motion, the trial court stated that Appellant "was told that he could question each panel completely before moving to the next panel if he so wished rather than en masse," and found that if Appellant questioned all the prospective jurors at one time, "that was a choice he made, not a directive of the court." Thus, Appellant has failed to show error. See Perez v. State , 258 Ga. 343, 344, 369 S.E.2d 256 (1988) (finding no reversible error where, in response to defendant's request to voir dire prospective jurors in panels of 12 at a time, trial court said, "Well, you will have this twelve here, that twelve there and that twelve there" ).

3. Appellant claims that the trial court erred in rejecting his challenge under Batson v. Kentucky , 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986), to the State's peremptory strike of an African-American prospective juror, Juror 33. Batson established a three-step process for evaluating claims of racial discrimination in the use of peremptory strikes:

(1) the opponent of a peremptory challenge must make a prima facie showing of racial discrimination; (2) the

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