Yates v. State

• Decision Date: 01 October 2001
• Docket Number: No. S01P0977.,S01P0977.
• Parties: YATES v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

553 S.E.2d 563

274 Ga. 312

YATES v. The STATE.

No. S01P0977.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

October 1, 2001.

Lindsey & Jacobs, Tamara Jacobs, Barnesville, English & Kemp, Arthur H. English IV, William A. Adams, Jr., Barnesville, for appellant.

William T. McBroom, III, Dist. Atty., Daniel A. Hiatt, Asst. Dist. Atty., Thurbert E. Baker, Atty. Gen., Mary Beth Westmoreland, Deputy Atty. Gen., Susan V. Boyleyn, Senior Asst. Atty. Gen., Paige R. Whitaker, Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellee.

BENHAM, Justice.

John Thomas Yates was convicted of malice murder, burglary, and aggravated assault. The jury recommended the death penalty for the murder after finding beyond a reasonable doubt that the murder was committed while Yates was engaged in the commission of a burglary. OCGA § 17-10-30(b)(2). The trial court sentenced Yates to death and he appeals. Because potential jurors were improperly excused from jury service, we reverse the convictions and sentences.¹

1. The evidence adduced at trial authorized the jury to find the following as facts. Yates had an on-again/off-again relationship with Kemylene Thompson. They had dated periodically for four years and had a baby in 1996, but they were not in a relationship with each other in April 1998. In the early morning hours of April 12, 1998, Thompson met Miller Crafter at a party at the local American Legion hall. Yates was also at the party and had an argument with Thompson about the provocative way she was dancing. At about 2:00 a.m., Thompson and Crafter went to her apartment and, after Thompson locked the front and bedroom doors, had sex. No one else was home.

About an hour after entering the apartment, Crafter heard a knock on the bedroom door. Yates then kicked in the door and said to Thompson, "[B]itch, you gonna die tonight." In the dim light of the bedroom it appeared to Crafter that Yates was hitting Thompson with his fist. Thompson screamed, "[Y]ou're hurting me, get out of here, you [are not] supposed to be in here." Then she collapsed and Yates turned to Crafter and said, "[Y]ou gonna die too." Crafter realized that Yates had a knife when he was stabbed in the back and side during the ensuing struggle. Crafter managed to restrain Yates until the arrival of a police officer who had been summoned by neighbors. The officer had to kick in the locked front door in order to gain entry; the police later discovered that Yates had entered the apartment through a window after propping it open with a stick. The knife was recovered from the bedroom floor. After he was handcuffed, Crafter told Yates that he had killed Thompson and Yates replied, "[S]o what." When Yates arrived at the jail, he yelled to the other inmates, "[T]hey got me this time, they got me for murder one, I killed the bitch, and if she ain't dead, I hope she goes to hell."

The medical examiner testified that Thompson was stabbed ten times in the chest, left arm, abdomen, finger and left thigh. The fatal wound was a stab wound to the chest that cut the aorta, resulting in severe and rapid blood loss. According to the medical examiner, Thompson had probably lived only about one minute after this wound, which had been inflicted with such force that the knife left a wound track deeper than the length of the blade. At trial, Yates claimed that Crafter attacked him when he entered the bedroom and that he had accidentally stabbed Thompson while defending himself.

The evidence summarized above was sufficient to authorize a reasonable trier of fact to find Yates guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of malice murder, burglary, and aggravated assault. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). The evidence was also sufficient to authorize the jury to find the statutory aggravating circumstance which supported his death sentence for the murder. Id.; OCGA § 17-10-35(c)(2).

2. Yates filed a pretrial motion requesting that the trial court personally determine all excusals from jury service and that the defense be provided with "notice and opportunity to be heard on any application by a potential juror to be excused" from jury service. The trial court granted the motion and ruled at a motion hearing that the procedure to be followed in this case with regard to excusals would be to require every potential juror who sought to be excused to make a written affidavit as to the reason why and to appear at a hearing so both sides have an opportunity to object. At the beginning of voir dire, defense counsel noticed that 49 of the 160 potential jurors had been struck from the jury list. When she expressed her concern about the missing potential jurors, the following colloquy took place:

TRIAL COURT: Well, the ones that were not there, they were not able to serve. That's my information.

DEFENSE COUNSEL: Did you determine them yourself, Your Honor, or is that something the Clerk did?

TRIAL COURT: No. No. I haven't—I haven't—that's what I'm told.

Yates's counsel objected to the trial court's failure to comply with its own order. When Yates renewed his objection on this ground after the conclusion of voir dire, the trial court asked the clerk of the court if she had excused any jurors and she replied, "If they had a doctor's excuse." The trial court overruled Yates's objection by stating that they had a sufficient number of qualified jurors regardless of the procedure.

According to notations scribbled on the jury list created for this trial, the court clerk excused 18 potential jurors for medical reasons. Three others were apparently excused by the clerk for business reasons, such as being the sole proprietor of a gas station or needing to attend scheduled employment training. The others removed from the list by the clerk were deceased, had moved out of the county, or were over 70 years old. The record contains only 14 written requests for a medical excusal from jury service, none written in affidavit form. Some are signed by doctors but often only state something like, "Please excuse ____ from jury duty due to health problems." The clerk never commented about the substance of any of these medical reasons, and when defense counsel attempted to elaborate on this objection, the trial court cut her off by stating, "I am through with that subject matter now."

In Georgia, there is no statutory exemption from jury duty for persons with medical problems. See OCGA § 15-12-1. However, the trial court or someone appointed in writing by the chief judge of the circuit may under OCGA § 15-12-1(a) excuse a potential juror from jury duty if the juror shows "good cause why he or she should be exempt from jury duty[.]" Id.; Thornton v. State, 264 Ga. 563(19), 449 S.E.2d 98 (1994). Thus, while a blanket, indiscriminate excusal of potential jurors who proffer medical excuses is incompatible with Georgia law and with the need to draw juries from a fair cross-section of the community, a trial court has the discretion to excuse a person based upon a determination that jury service would impose a "special and undue hardship" on that particular person due to a medical condition. See Thornton, supra; McMichen v. State, 265 Ga. 598(33)(a), 458 S.E.2d 833 (1995). Since there was no inquiry into the nature of most of the medical excuses, no such determination of special and undue hardship was made. In fact, it appears from the record that every potential juror who offered a medical excuse was summarily removed from jury service. While a trial court has broad discretion in determining the validity of each request to be excused from jury service, McClain v. State, 267 Ga. 378(1)(c), 477 S.E.2d 814 (1996), that discretion is abused when the trial court fails to make any inquiry into whether the proffered excuse constitutes "good cause." See OCGA § 15-12-1(a); Thornton, supra; McMichen, supra. Because the record shows that a substantial number of potential jurors were released from jury service without such an inquiry, we conclude that the trial court erred and that this error affecting the composition of the array mandates a reversal of Yates's convictions and sentences. See Thornton, supra; McMichen, supra; Holsey v. State, 271 Ga. 856(2), 524 S.E.2d 473 (1999). See also Hendrick v. State, 257 Ga. 17(2), 354 S.E.2d 433 (1987) (a failure to comply with the essential and substantial provisions of OCGA § 15-12-1 can vitiate the array). Further, the record contains no written order authorizing the clerk to excuse potential jurors and providing guidelines for such excusals in accordance with OCGA § 15-12-1(a). See Hendrick, supra; Lumpkin v. State, 255 Ga. 363(1), 338 S.E.2d 431 (1986), overruled on other grounds by Woodard v. State, 269 Ga. 317(2), 496 S.E.2d 896 (1998). In fact, the trial court at the pretrial hearing specifically stated that the court clerk's authority to defer potential jurors did not extend to death penalty cases. Because the trial court's abuse of discretion prevented the presentation of a proper jury array, Yates must be retried. See id.

3. Yates claims that the trial court erred by refusing to charge the jury on voluntary manslaughter as a lesser-included offense of malice murder. Yates testified at trial that he was not living with the victim and was not in a relationship with her in April 1998, but spoke with her on April 9, 1998, and she wanted him back.² He said he saw her at the American Legion on April 12 and they agreed to meet after the dance to talk. They also had an argument about the way she was dancing. Yates testified that he left the club and went to a restaurant for a while and then convinced a friend to drop him off near Thompson's apartment so he could "get this thing straightened out with Kem." He climbed through Thompson's window after she did not answer his knock on the front door because he had a "suspicion" that she was with someone else. Although he said he was not planning to hurt anybody, he went to Thompson's bedroom door and heard "a moaning sound...