Goins v. StateGoins v. State
After a jury trial, Appellant Charmane Goins was convicted of malice murder in connection with the strangling death of Lauren Taylor, and the trial court summarily denied his motion for new trial. In a prior appeal, this Court held that the evidence presented at Appellant‘s trial was legally sufficient to support his murder conviction, but we otherwise vacated the trial court‘s order and remanded the case for the court to make factual findings and legal conclusions regarding Appellant‘s claim that his constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated; we did not address his other claims. See Goins v. State, 306 Ga. 55, 55 & n.1 (829 SE2d 89) (2019) (Goins I).
On remand, the trial court issued a detailed order rejecting the speedy trial claim and again denying Appellant‘s motion for new trial. He then filed this second appeal, raising his constitutional
1. As we explained in upholding the sufficiency of the evidence supporting Appellant‘s murder conviction in Goins I:
Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the evidence at trial showed the following. Appellant, who was married and lived in Tunnel Hill in north[west] Georgia, began an affair with Taylor in 2013. In August 2014, Appellant told his friend Karl Wyatt that he wanted to end the affair but could not because Taylor was threatening to expose it to his wife and children. Taylor was last seen leaving her friend[ Dallas Regal‘s] house with Appellant around 1:30 p.m. on October 7, 2014; the next morning, her partially burnt body was found in Deshong Park in Gwinnett County. The cause of death was manual strangulation, after which her body had been doused in gasoline and set on fire.
Appellant told investigators that he dropped off Taylor at a mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee on the afternoon of October 7 and then returned to Chattanooga
around 11:00 that night to help Wyatt with car trouble. Wyatt initially confirmed that alibi, but he later recanted and testified that he was not with Appellant that night and that Appellant had asked him to provide the false alibi. Appellant‘s cell phone records showed that, instead of going to Chattanooga that night as he had claimed, Appellant actually traveled south along I-75 around midnight, and then traveled east along I-285 toward Gwinnett County around 1:00 a.m. In addition, later on the day [Taylor‘s dead body was found], Appellant pawned a guitar that Taylor had stolen from an ex-boyfriend. Finally, Appellant‘s former cellmate testified that Appellant had confessed that he killed Taylor by strangling her with the seatbelt while she was sleeping and left her body at a “gang park” that Wyatt had told him about. Appellant testified at trial, giving a new version of his alibi story and claiming that Taylor gave him the stolen guitar as payment for gas.
2. Appellant contends that his constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated. That claim, which Appellant raised in a pretrial motion to dismiss his indictment and again in his amended motion for new trial, requires the trial court to make findings of fact and conclusions of law under the two-part framework set forth in Barker v. Wingo, 407 U.S. 514 (92 SCt 2182, 33 LE2d 101) (1972), and refined in Doggett v. United States, 505 U.S. 647 (112 SCt 2686, 120 LE2d 520) (1992). See Heard v. State, 295 Ga. 559, 562 (761 SE2d 314) (2014). The first part of the framework requires the court to determine whether the length of time between Appellant‘s arrest and his trial was presumptively prejudicial. See id. If it was, the trial court is required under the second part of the framework to apply a four-factor balancing test that examines the length of the delay, the reasons for it, Appellant‘s assertion of his right to a speedy trial, and whether he suffered prejudice as a result of the delay. See id.
In its brief oral ruling denying Appellant‘s pretrial motion to dismiss and in its July 2018 order summarily denying his motion for new trial, the trial court failed to make the necessary findings of fact and conclusions of law under the Barker-Doggett framework. Accordingly, in the first appeal of this case, we vacated the trial court‘s judgment in part and remanded the case for the entry of an order containing appropriate findings and conclusions regarding the speedy trial claim. See Goins I, 306 Ga. at 58.
In its ten-page order on remand, the trial court correctly determined that the thirty-two-month delay between Appellant‘s arrest and trial was presumptively prejudicial. The court then made
Relying on California v. Trombetta, 467 U.S. 479 (104 SCt 2528, 81 LE2d 413) (1984), and Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51 (109 SCt 333, 102 LE2d 281) (1988), Appellant contends that the State deprived him of due process by failing to preserve Regal‘s clothing or better document his injuries. He argues that because Taylor was manually strangled and her body was burned with gasoline, the detective ignored the obvious exculpatory value of the gas-soaked clothing and scratches, and that if the clothing had been collected, Appellant could have conducted DNA or other testing on it, the results of which might have exonerated him.
In evaluating whether a defendant‘s constitutional right to due process was violated when the State failed to preserve evidence that could be exculpatory,
a court must determine both whether the evidence was material and whether the police acted in bad faith in failing to preserve the evidence. . . . Youngblood, 488 U.S. at 51 . . . . To meet the standard of constitutional materiality, the evidence must possess an exculpatory value that was apparent before it was destroyed, and be of such a nature that the defendant would be unable to obtain comparable evidence by other reasonably available means. . . . Trombetta, 467 U.S. 479. . . .
Krause v. State, 286 Ga. 745, 752 (691 SE2d 211) (2010) (citation and punctuation omitted). See also State v. Mussman, 289 Ga. 586, 590 (713 SE2d 822) (2011) (applying this test where the State failed to preserve evidence that ”could have been exculpatory, but where it is not known that the evidence would have been exculpatory“) (emphasis in original).
This test is ordinarily applied when State officials dispose of potential evidence that was previously in the State‘s actual or constructive possession. See, e.g., Youngblood, 488 U.S. at 52-53 (sexual assault kit not fully tested and victim‘s clothing not refrigerated); Trombetta, 467 U.S. at 482 (suspected drunk drivers’ breath samples not preserved by arresting officers); Hill v. State, 308 Ga. 638, 648-649 (842 SE2d 853) (2020) (correctional officer‘s video of post-crime search lost); Clay v. State, 290 Ga. 822, 839-840, 841-843 (725 SE2d 260) (2012) (blood samples taken from defendant destroyed); Mussman, 289 Ga. at 587, 590 (defendant‘s impounded car released). Cf. Krause, 286 Ga. at 752 (applying the test to a bat seen in a crime scene photograph but not taken into evidence). That is different from the situation presented here, where a detective did not try to collect or further document certain potential evidence in the first place — evidence that might have required Regal‘s consent or a search warrant to obtain — and no State actor then had anything to do with the disposition of that potential evidence. Cf. Youngblood, 488 U.S. at 59 (disagreeing “strongly” with the claim that “the Due Process Clause is violated when the police fail to use a particular investigatory tool” and explaining that “the police do not have a constitutional duty to perform any particular tests“).
But we need not decide whether Appellant‘s claim invokes the test to determine a due process violation based on the State‘s failure to preserve evidence. Even if we assume it does, and even if we also assume that he could establish under the first part of the test that the evidence was constitutionally material (and even if we assume
4. Appellant contends next that the trial court erred by failing to suppress evidence obtained from his cell phone. Appellant‘s pretrial counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence, arguing that the lead detective seized Appellant‘s phone from him during an interview about two weeks after Taylor‘s murder, without a warrant and under no applicable exception to the warrant requirement, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The trial court held a hearing on the motion but did not issue a ruling at the hearing or in an order, and Appellant‘s trial counsel did not request a ruling or object when the cell phone evidence was admitted during the trial. We therefore review Appellant‘s claim only for plain error. See
Pretermitting whether the trial court committed an obvious error by failing to suppress the cell phone evidence, Appellant cannot show that any such error likely affected the outcome of his trial, and indeed he makes no effort to do so in his briefs here. During the trial, the lead detective testified that the downloaded content of Appellant‘s cell phone showed that Taylor‘s phone number, which was saved in Appellant‘s phone under the name “Mr. Davis,” had been deleted at some unknown time. The investigator who downloaded the content of the cell phone testified that some text messages and time-and-date entries for phone calls between Appellant‘s phone and Taylor‘s phone had also been deleted at an unknown time. The investigator‘s report, which was admitted into evidence, showed that Appellant‘s phone and Taylor‘s phone
The evidence that Appellant saved Taylor‘s phone number under a false name and that he deleted her number, their text messages, and some of their call entries at some unknown time was not especially incriminating, given that Appellant admitted to the police and at trial that he had an extramarital affair with Taylor. And although the report showed and the investigator briefly testified that two of the deleted call entries were from the day Taylor was last seen alive, indicating that the calls had been deleted that day or sometime after Taylor‘s death, that evidence was not mentioned again during the trial.
On the other hand, the State presented strong evidence of Appellant‘s guilt that is unchallenged here, including evidence that he told Wyatt that he wanted to end the affair with Taylor but could not because of her threats to expose it; that he was the last person
5. During direct examination of the lead detective, the State introduced into evidence a video recording of one of Appellant‘s interviews with the police. Outside the presence of the jury, the prosecutor explained that he had redacted from the recording any discussion of Appellant‘s prior conviction. The prosecutor then played the video recording for the jury. Near the end of the approximately hour-long recording, one of the interviewing investigators told Appellant that they were obtaining a search warrant for his DNA. Appellant said, “When I left prison, they already took my DNA. So you should have records of my DNA. That might help you.” About four minutes later, during a phone call to his wife while he was left alone in the interview room, Appellant said, “Like I told them, you already got my DNA. They took my DNA before I left prison.”
After playing the recording, the prosecutor continued his direct
Appellant now claims that the trial court abused its discretion by denying the mistrial motion because the references to his incarceration constituted improper character evidence. This claim, however, is not preserved for review because Appellant failed to “make a contemporaneous motion for a mistrial at the time [he] became aware of the matter giving rise to the motion.” Coley v. State, 305 Ga. 658, 661 (827 SE2d 241) (2019) (citation and punctuation omitted). See also Kilpatrick v. State, 308 Ga. 194, 199-200 (839 SE2d 551) (2020).
But even if Appellant had properly preserved this issue, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by denying the mistrial motion. “Whether to grant a mistrial is within the discretion of the
6. Finally, Appellant contends that the trial court abused its discretion by excluding evidence about Taylor that he asserts would have supported his defense theory that other people had a motive to kill her. We disagree.
Appellant‘s pretrial counsel filed a motion to introduce “character evidence” about Taylor, including her prostitution- and drug-related convictions and posts from her Facebook page. At the hearing on the motion, counsel argued that Taylor‘s convictions and Facebook posts showed that she solicited customers for sex and drugs and that the posts also showed that she had conflicts with people other than Appellant. Counsel asserted that this evidence showed “the various suspects in this case, all the people [Taylor] came in contact with,” and was relevant to prove that other people could have had a motive to kill her. The trial court denied the
Evidence is relevant if it has “any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.”
Appellant has not shown how the evidence of Taylor‘s convictions and Facebook posts met these basic requirements of admissibility.
This Court has followed the general rule that, before [evidence] can be introduced that another person committed the charged crime, the proffered evidence
Roberts v. State, 305 Ga. 257, 260 (824 SE2d 326) (2019) (citation and punctuation omitted). The proffered evidence showing that Taylor had been convicted of prostitution and drug crimes and that unknown individuals contacted her to obtain sex or drugs or had some sort of conflict with her during the weeks and months before her death would have done nothing to establish that someone other than Appellant killed her, because none of the proffered evidence linked any other individual to the murder.8 Thus, the convictions and Facebook posts would not have raised a reasonable inference that Appellant was innocent or directly connected anyone else to Taylor‘s murder, and “the trial court was not required to allow
Moreover, Appellant has not shown that the form of the proffered evidence was proper under
Judgment affirmed. All the Justices concur, except Warren, J., not participating and Bethel, J., disqualified.