Woods v. State

• Decision Date: 24 August 2021
• Docket Number: S21A0862
• Parties: WOODS v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

862 S.E.2d 526

WOODS

v.The STATE.

S21A0862

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: August 24, 2021

Jason Michael McLendon, McLendon Law Firm, LLC, 1800 Peachtree Street, Suite 300, Matthew Kyle Winchester, Law Offices of Matthew K. Winchester, 1800 Peachtree Street, NW, Suite 300, Atlanta, Georgia 30309, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Meghan Hobbs Hill, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Bradfield M. Shealy, District Attorney, James Bennett Threlkeld, Senior A.D.A., Michelle Thomas Harrison, A.D.A., Southern Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, P.O. Box 99, Valdosta, Georgia 31603-0099, for Appellee.

Boggs, Presiding Justice.

After a 2013 jury trial, Alexander Woods III was convicted of five counts of malice murder and given five consecutive life sentences in connection with the 2004 shooting deaths of four members of the Resendez family and their housekeeper. Woods’ motion for new trial was denied, and he appeals, enumerating nine alleged instances of ineffective assistance of trial counsel. For the reasons stated below, we vacate the trial court's order denying Woods’ motion for new trial, and we remand the case for the trial court to rule in the first instance on the question of deficiency of trial counsel and related evidentiary issues.

On November 8, 2004, three of the Resendez children and their cousin arrived home from school to find the Resendez children's parents, Jaime and Katrina Resendez, shot to death in their home just outside the city of Moultrie in Colquitt County. The children immediately left to seek help; sheriff's deputies and EMTs arrived and discovered a total of five victims in the house, including the family housekeeper, Katrina's mother, and the youngest Resendez child, a toddler.

The investigation by the Colquitt County Sheriff's Department and the GBI initially led to Jerry Johnny Thompson, who was involved in an extensive drug smuggling and dealing operation with Jaime, and Thompson's "muscle" or "enforcer," Anthony "Amp" Davis, as suspects.¹ In 2006, Thompson was indicted for the murders. In 2009, Thompson's girlfriend, Yvonne Wilma Stover, also was indicted. Then, on March 22, 2011, Woods was indicted on five counts of malice murder, five counts of felony murder, and five counts of aggravated assault. On November 21, 2011, Thompson pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison on one murder count, with sentencing delayed on the four remaining counts pending his testimony at Woods’ trial. Stover's indictment remained pending at the time of the trial.

I. The evidence presented at trial

Woods was tried before a jury from May 6 to 10, 2013. At trial, Thompson was the principal witness for the State and the only witness to identify Woods directly as a participant in the crimes. Thompson told the jury the following. Jaime was transporting marijuana from Texas to Georgia for their supplier, Hector Valdez. After several shipments were intercepted and seized by law enforcement, resulting in Jaime's owing large sums of money to Valdez, Jaime stopped communicating with Valdez. Valdez instructed Thompson to contact Jaime and convince him to call Valdez, and Thompson planned to scare Jaime into calling Valdez by sending Davis over to the house to threaten him. Thompson contacted Davis, who told him he would need to bring his "homeboy" with him to confront Jaime.

Thompson and Stover met Davis and his "homeboy," whom Thompson identified as Woods, at a gas station near the Resendez home on the morning of the murders. Thompson did not know Woods, but he later gave a description of Davis’ "homeboy" to the police, assisted a forensic artist in preparing a sketch, and later identified Woods in a lineup.² Thompson gave the two men a bag with two bullet-proof vests, an AK automatic rifle, and a Lorcin pistol; led them to the Resendez house; and left them there.

Shortly afterward, Davis called Thompson and told him to come back, telling him "there's trouble ... get back right now." Thompson returned to the house while Stover remained in the car, and found Jaime lying on the floor, shot dead. Woods was "acting crazy," dragging the family's housekeeper by her hair and holding a pistol to her head, asking her "where the money's at, where's the money at." Thompson attempted to explain to Woods that dealers "don't keep money where we sleep," but Woods did not listen. Thompson also saw Woods take a distinctive gold necklace from Jaime's neck. Thompson contacted Stover by radio and instructed her to leave. Shortly thereafter, Jaime's wife and her mother walked into the house, and Woods grabbed them and tried to get Thompson to translate to tell them where the money was. At that point, Thompson decided to leave and went outside to Davis’ SUV.

Thompson entered the SUV and "waited for a second," and then Davis and Woods came out and told Thompson to drive away. Woods asked Davis if he had collected all his bullets, and Davis said he had, and Woods said he had his. Then Davis said, "I wished you hadn't of did that to that baby," and Woods responded that the child was "going to grow up one day." Davis said that he took about $2,000 from the Resendez house and divided that money with Woods. After the men changed clothes at a nearby house, Thompson disposed of the firearms in a swampy area. Sheriff's deputies and GBI agents, led to the scene by Thompson, located a Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle and a magazine for a Lorcin pistol there; the pistol itself was never found. Ballistic tests determined that a bullet and a bullet fragment found at the scene were fired from the recovered rifle and that other bullets and shell casings recovered at the scene were fired from a Lorcin 9mm pistol.

Both Woods’ sister and his girlfriend at the time testified that Woods did not have a car or a phone, and usually had very little money.³ On the day of the murders, however, Woods had a large, unexplained amount of loose cash and gave some to his girlfriend to get her nails done. A friend of Woods testified that in August 2011, Woods called him and asked him to tell Woods’ girlfriend to "get rid of that necklace" because that was "all they had on him." The State also introduced telephone records showing calls on the morning of the murders made between Thompson, Davis, and a telephone number associated with Woods.⁴

The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts, and on May 10, 2013, Woods was sentenced to serve five consecutive life terms in prison. On May 14, 2013, Thompson was sentenced to life imprisonment on the remaining four murder counts in his indictment, to run concurrently with the original life sentence imposed in 2011. In October 2013, Stover pled guilty to five counts of aggravated assault as a lesser included offense of felony murder and was sentenced to serve nine years of a 20-year sentence in prison, with the balance on probation, concurrently on all five counts.

II. The motion for new trial

Woods filed a timely motion for new trial asserting numerous claims of error. He raised nine different instances of ineffective assistance of trial counsel, including counsel's alleged failure to adequately cross-examine the witnesses against him and to investigate or call exculpatory witnesses.⁵ Among other claims, Woods asserted in his motion for new trial, and continues to assert on appeal, that his trial counsel were deficient in failing to use a wide range of materials to impeach or discredit Thompson, including the State's death penalty notice with respect to Thompson's indictment and the possibility of its withdrawal in exchange for Thompson's testimony; Thompson's alleged written and oral confessions to the murders that did not mention or identify Woods as a party to the crimes; his alleged prior inconsistent statements to investigators and others regarding the facts and circumstances of the murders; his apparent attempt to create an alibi for the time of Davis’ murder; his alleged inconsistencies in his identification of Woods; his alleged pretrial attempts to influence Stover's testimony; and his prior alleged violence and threats of violence against various individuals, including Stover, a federal prosecutor, and others who testified or gave statements to investigators. Woods asserted in his motion for new trial that this evidence, especially when considered cumulatively, called Thompson's trial testimony into such question that the jury most likely would have rejected his testimony altogether had counsel employed the evidence at trial, thus creating a reasonable probability of prejudice from counsel's deficiencies, particularly in light of the weakness of other evidentiary support for the verdicts.

At the 2019 hearing on Woods’ motion for new trial, at which both of his trial counsel testified, Woods’ appellate counsel examined trial counsel regarding witness statements, GBI investigatory reports, jail call records, and other documents pertaining to the initial investigation of Thompson in 2004 and 2005 ("the Thompson documents"). These documents, however, were never authenticated during the hearing. The State objected to the introduction of the Thompson documents not only because they were hearsay but also because they had not been authenticated. After some discussion, during which the State repeated its authentication argument, the trial court sustained the objection to the Thompson documents, but without specifying the basis for its decision.

Woods’ trial attorneys were the only witnesses at the hearing, and both testified that they had never seen the Thompson documents before; Woods’ lead counsel ultimately testified that he did not believe the State ever produced the documents to the defense in discovery: "Well, here's the thing I'm having a problem with. You're asking questions about stuff...