Lewis v. State

744 S.E.2d 21, 293 Ga. 110, 2013 WL 2372187
CourtSupreme Court of Georgia
DecidedJune 3, 2013
DocketS13A0225; S13A0226
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 744 S.E.2d 21 (Lewis v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Georgia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Lewis v. State, 744 S.E.2d 21, 293 Ga. 110, 2013 WL 2372187 (Ga. 2013).

Opinion

BENHAM, Justice.

Appellants Atu Lewis (Lewis) and Jacque Dominique Clark (Clark) were convicted of murder and related crimes stemming from a home invasion that took place in Clayton County.1 Lewis was sentenced to life in prison without parole for malice murder and a term of years for his other crimes.2 Clark was sentenced to life in [111]*111•prison with parole for felony murder and a term of years for his remaining crimes.3 For reasons set forth below, the appellants’ convictions are affirmed.

The underlying facts show that on the morning of June 21, 2007, Lewis, Clark, Marcel Brower, and Hilarie Ford acted on a plan to steal drugs and money from the victim Troy Marine. Brower testified at trial4 and explained that the group’s plan was for Ford to call the victim, to offer him a private dance as a ruse to gain access to his house, and to unlock the front door for the other three to enter the house and rob the victim while Ford was keeping him distracted. Lewis and the other two men armed themselves with guns provided by Lewis. Brower stated he was armed with a .40 caliber weapon, Lewis had a 9mm handgun, and Clark had a .38 caliber gun. Clark brought shoestrings for the purpose of tying up the victim. All four drove together to the victim’s house. Once Ford entered the house, she alerted Brower by cell phone that there were children in the house and that she could not unlock the front door. Lewis and the other men entered the victim’s house by breaking and going through a side window.

After entering the house, the men encountered the victim’s three children (two boys who were eleven and ten years old and a five-year-old girl) in an upstairs bedroom, and Brower moved the children downstairs, making them lie down on the floor with pillows over their heads. Clark watched over the kids. The victim was oblivious to the circumstances of his children because Ford had the music playing loudly in the victim’s bedroom and because the bedroom door was [112]*112locked. Brower took the victim’s younger son by gunpoint, brought-him upstairs to where Lewis was standing, and they made the boy knock on the bedroom door until the victim opened it. When the victim opened the door and saw the men with guns and his son, he immediately started throwing punches, knocking Lewis into the wall. In response, Lewis shot the victim. After the shooting, the victim’s oldest son testified that the three men fled the house through the front door. A next-door neighbor testified that she saw three men exiting the victim’s house and two of them enter a vehicle, while the other man ran up the street. Brower confirmed that he and Lewis drove away in the vehicle, picking up Clark who had run up the street on foot. Ford, who had been left behind at the victim’s house, called Clark who instructed her to wipe away fingerprints at the scene. After driving for a time and letting Clark out of the car, Brower and Lewis circled back and picked up Ford in a different subdivision. When they picked her up, Ford had with her a pound of marijuana from the victim’s house which Brower later took to sell. Clark’s roommate testified that Clark called him that same day and said he had just killed somebody and asked the roommate for a ride.

After the perpetrators left the house, the victim’s children ran across the street to a neighbor’s house and called police. At the scene, the police recovered a 9mm shell casing. They also obtained latent palm and finger prints from the scene and the car used during the crime. The palm and finger prints were eventually found to match the known palm and finger prints of Brower and Lewis. Blood evidence recovered from the car matched Lewis’s DNAand was consistent with Brower’s testimony that Lewis injured his hand when he broke the window to enter the victim’s house. Several witnesses, including Brower, testified that at the time the crimes took place, Lewis and Clark both had shoulder-length dreadlocks. The victim’s eldest son testified that two of the perpetrators had dreadlocks and the third had short hair. Brower was apprehended first and, about a week after the crime, Lewis, Clark, and Ford were apprehended on drug charges while driving in Clark’s vehicle in Laurens County. The state trooper who stopped Lewis and Clark in Laurens County testified that both men had bad hair cuts and police recovered hair clippers from Clark’s car after it was impounded upon his arrest in Laurens County.

The medical examiner testified that the shooter was within four feet of the victim when he was shot and the bullet pierced the victim’s heart, diaphragm, and liver causing his death.

[113]*113 Case No. S13A0225

1. Lewis claims the evidence was insufficient to convict him for malice murder and the other charges for which he was convicted based on the fact that the State’s key witness was Brower, an accomplice to the crime. See OCGA § 24-4-8 (2012).5 Lewis argues that Brower’s testimony was uncorroborated and therefore the evidence against him was insufficient to convict. We disagree. This Court has held that “slight evidence from an extraneous source identifying the accused as a participant in the criminal act is sufficient corroboration of the accomplice to support a verdict.” Moore v. State, 288 Ga. 187, 189 (1) (702 SE2d 176) (2010) (citations and punctuation omitted). Here there was slight evidence from an extraneous source identifying Lewis as a participant in the crime. Specifically, authorities found Lewis’s blood and palm print on the car used during the crime which evidence corroborated Brower’s testimony that Lewis injured himself on the broken glass of the window the men used to gain entry to the victim’s house. The authorities found a hole in the wall of the victim’s house where both Brower and the victim’s son described a struggle took place in which Lewis was pushed into the wall. The victim’s son testified that two of the men who entered his home wore dreadlocks, and witnesses in addition to Brower testified that Lewis wore dreadlocks at the time the crime occurred. When Lewis was apprehended a week later, he had altered his appearance by cutting his dreadlocks, presumably to avoid detection by police. The evidence adduced at trial and summarized above was sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find appellant Lewis guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes for which he was convicted. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307 (99 SCt 2781, 61 LE2d 560) (1979).

2. Lewis alleges the trial court erred when it allowed the admission of testimony which he contends improperly placed his character into evidence and erred when it failed to grant a mistrial baséd on the State’s violation of discovery rules in regard to the information elicited from the testimony. At trial, Brower testified Lewis told him that Lewis and Clark had a conversation about killing Ford, purportedly to prevent her from telling police about the shooting. Lewis argues he was unaware of Brower’s statement about the alleged conversation because the State failed to produce it during discovery. [114]*114The transcript shows prosecutors learned of this alleged conversation between Lewis and Clark when they interviewed Brower during their trial preparation a few weeks prior to trial.

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Bluebook (online)
744 S.E.2d 21, 293 Ga. 110, 2013 WL 2372187, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/lewis-v-state-ga-2013.