GRAHAM v. THE STATE
S17A0702
Supreme Court of Georgia
August 14, 2017
301 Ga. 675
BLACKWELL, Justice.
FINAL COPY
BLACKWELL,
DeSean Lamar Graham was tried by a DeKalb County jury, and he was convicted of the murder of Carlos Daniels and the unlawful possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. Graham appeals, contending that the evidence is insufficient to sustain his convictions and that the trial court erred when it refused to charge the jury on voluntary manslaughter as a lesser included offense. Upon our review of the record and briefs, we see no error, and we affirm.1
1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the evidence shows that on July 9, 2012, Graham drove his girlfriend and his eight-year-old nephew to the pool at the Jasmine at Winter’s Chapel Apartments in DeKalb County. Graham lived at Cornerstone Apartments, which is adjacent to the Jasmine.
When Graham returned to his apartment at Cornerstone, his girlfriend observed that he was out of breath and that he threw up in the bathroom. Graham told his girlfriend that he shot “the dude at the pool” because “the dude” had “disrespected his family.” He also provided several details about the shooting, including that he continued firing his weapon at Daniels after he fell to the ground and that he fled the scene by running through the “cut,” which was a wooded trail between the Jasmine and Cornerstone. For several months, Graham’s girlfriend told no one about the confession.
Police investigators initially were unable to identify or locate the man who had been involved in the poolside confrontation with Daniels. But Graham’s girlfriend eventually saw a report that police were “searching for a man who shot and killed another man after an altercation at a swimming pool at . . . [t]he Jasmine at Winter’s Chapel Apartments.” She told a friend about Graham’s confession, the police were notified, and Graham was arrested. Graham admitted to the poolside altercation with Daniels, but he denied that he returned to the Jasmine to shoot him.
On appeal, Graham contends that the evidence is insufficient to support his convictions, and he relies upon
Graham points to the lack of physical evidence connecting him to the crime, the failure of any eyewitness to identify him, and his assertion that his girlfriend was not a credible witness. But the State “was not required to produce any physical evidence,” Johnson v. State, 296 Ga. 504, 505 (1) (769 SE2d 87) (2015), and, as we have explained many times, “it is the role of the jury to resolve conflicts in the evidence and to determine the credibility of witnesses, and the resolution of such conflicts adversely to the defendant does not render the evidence insufficient.” Merritt v. State, 292 Ga. 327, 330 (1) (737 SE2d 673) (2013) (citation and punctuation omitted). Viewing all the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict, we conclude that it was sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Graham was guilty of the crimes of which he was convicted. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307, 319 (III) (B) (99 SCt 2781, 61 LE2d 560) (1979).
2. We turn now to Graham’s contention that the trial court should have charged the jury on voluntary manslaughter as a lesser included offense. Such a charge is required only when there is some evidence that the defendant acted “solely as the result of a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient
Here, the poolside confrontation was not the type of “serious provocation” that would require a charge on voluntary manslaughter. Graham acknowledged that he and Daniels merely engaged in an argument, and his most serious complaint about Daniels’s conduct was that it initially made him fear that Daniels “wanted to hit [him] and stuff” or might try to “push [him] in the pool or something.” Graham points to evidence that he was “very angry” after the argument with Daniels, but there was no evidence that Daniels’s conduct at the pool would provoke any reasonable person to go home, get a gun, run back to Daniels’s apartment complex, and shoot him. We find that Graham’s response to the confrontation at the pool was objectively unreasonable as a matter of law, and it does not support a voluntary manslaughter charge. See Johnson v. State, 292 Ga. 785, 787 (2) (741 SE2d 627) (2013); Lewandowski v. State, 267 Ga. 831, 832 (2) (483 SE2d 582) (1997) (
Judgment affirmed. All the Justices concur.
Decided August 14, 2017.
Murder. DeKalb Superior Court. Before Judge Flake.
Matthew K. Winchester, for appellant.
Sherry Boston, District Attorney, Deborah D. Wellborn, Shelly D. Faulk, Assistant District Attorneys; Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula K. Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Aimee F. Sobhani, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.