Jones v. Georgia
Annotate this CaseBryan Jones was convicted of felony murder and other offenses in connection with a shooting that killed Dorian Drewery and injured Joshua Childs. Jones appealed, arguing: (1) the trial court erred in giving a jury instruction on other-acts evidence under OCGA § 24-4-404 (b) when no such evidence was admitted at trial; and (2) trial counsel rendered constitutionally ineffective assistance in (a) agreeing to a stipulation that prejudiced Jones’s defense and (b) failing to request a jury instruction on voluntary manslaughter. The Georgia Supreme Court concluded the trial court’s error in giving the other-acts jury instruction was harmless: among other things, the court omitted that oral instruction from the written instructions sent back with the jury; it properly instructed that other acts could be considered only if it was more likely than not that Jones had committed them, and because there was no evidence of such other acts, the jury could not have made that finding; and in any event, the instruction had little relevance to the central question of whether Jones’s use of deadly force was justified under the circumstances. As for the ineffective-assistance claims, the Supreme Court found the record showed that trial counsel’s decision to agree to the stipulation was the product of a reasonable strategic effort to prevent the State from offering potentially “devastating” rebuttal evidence. Similarly, counsel’s decision not to request a jury instruction on voluntary manslaughter was reasonable given Jones’s desire to present an “all or nothing” justification defense and the fact that the evidence supporting voluntary manslaughter was thin. So Jones failed to establish trial error or ineffective assistance, and the Supreme Court therefore affirmed his convictions and sentences.
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