Lord v. State

820 S.E.2d 16, 304 Ga. 532
Supreme Court of Georgia·Decided October 9, 2018·No. S18A0959·Published·Cited by 16 cases

Opinion

MELTON, Chief Justice.

**532Following a jury trial, Manuel G. Lord, acting pro se, appeals his conviction for malice murder and related crimes, raising numerous enumerations of error.1 For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

*20**5331. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the facts show that Lord, Damion Braithwaite, Dukar Watson, and Anthony Davis were friends who regularly spent time together and used Lord's vehicle to travel around, as Lord was the only one who owned a car.2 The four men later met James Ward, Jr., who joined the group. On February 4, 1996, Lord and his four accomplices conspired to rob Chauncey Fleming, whom Watson already knew. Watson called Fleming from Ward's home phone to arrange to spend the evening of February 5, 1996 with him. All five accomplices rode to Fleming's apartment in Lord's car. Fleming let the five into the apartment, and they proceeded to smoke marijuana and watch television in the living room. At some point, Braithwaite found a gun hidden in the sofa where he was sitting, and he signaled to the others that the robbery should begin.

Fleming was subdued at gunpoint, tied up, gagged, and left on the living room floor. The accomplices then searched the apartment and found Eddie Lee McMillian and Nekeba Turner asleep in the bedroom. McMillian and Turner were pulled out of the bed and onto the floor while the defendants searched for money and valuables. Afterwards, Lord and his accomplices decided to kill Fleming, McMillian, and Turner. They devised a plan in which each accomplice would shoot a victim. That way, one accomplice could not incriminate another without consequences. Davis shot McMillian in the back. Watson shot McMillian in the head. Braithwaite shot Turner in the head. Lord shot Fleming in the head. Ward was the only accomplice who did not shoot one of the victims. The same weapon was used to kill all three victims.

As no fingerprints of potential suspects were found at the scene, the investigation went cold until November 24, 1997. On that day, Detective Strozier received a call from Hafitha Braithwaite Miller, the wife of co-defendant Braithwaite. She provided details of the **534crime scene that had not been released to the public which she learned from Braithwaite, and she implicated all five accomplices in the murders. Detective Strozier followed up on Miller's information and learned that Lord and Ward had been arrested by Atlanta police with a gun on February 16, 1996-eleven days after the murders. The weapon was retrieved from police property, and subsequent ballistics testing showed that the gun had been used to murder the victims at Fleming's apartment.

Both Ward and Davis testified at Lord's trial, each corroborating the other and providing independent details of the crimes as set forth above. In turn, this accomplice testimony was generally consistent with the information that Miller had learned from her husband, and the testimony of Ward, Davis, and Miller was also consistent with the evidence *21found at the crime scene.3 Also, Ward testified that he had obtained the murder weapon from Braithwaite following the murders and that Lord was with him when he was arrested with the murder weapon shortly after the triple homicide.4

This evidence was more than sufficient to enable the jury to find Lord guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.5 Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) ; OCGA § 16-2-20 (parties to a crime).6

2. In two related enumerations of error, Lord contends that the trial court erred by allowing Davis's trial attorney to pretend to participate in jury selection after Davis entered a guilty plea during the jury selection process. We disagree.

The record reveals that Lord and Davis were originally going to be tried together, but Davis pled guilty during the second day of jury selection. Lord then moved for a mistrial and asked to start over with jury selection. Lord argued that the existing venire might draw a **535negative inference if Davis and his attorney were no longer sitting at the defense table when voir dire resumed. The trial court denied the motion. At the time, counsel for Lord and Davis agreed that, after Davis pled guilty, Davis and his attorney would continue to appear to participate in jury selection so as to not alert the jury to the fact that Davis had entered a plea.7

Though Lord's counsel stated that he was making a motion for mistrial, the reasons he stated for making this motion indicate that, in substance, he was requesting a new jury panel.8 See Sharpe v. State, 272 Ga. 684, 687 (5), 531 S.E.2d 84 (2000) ("[T]here is authority for disregarding the nomenclature of a defendant's premature motion for mistrial when the clear import of the motion is that the jury panel be excused and another panel be made available"). Treating Lord's request as such a motion for a new jury panel, there was no abuse of discretion in the trial court's decision to deny it. The corrective measures in this case, to which Lord agreed, succeeded in concealing from the jury for the remainder of voir dire that Davis had pled guilty. Thus, the curative measure was sufficient to ensure that the remainder of the jury selection process was fair to Lord. Lord received a jury "free from even a suspicion of prejudgment or fixed opinion." (Citations and punctuation omitted.) Callaway v. State, 208 Ga. App. 508 (2), 431 S.E.2d 143 (1993). Moreover, only a second alternate was selected during that time period after Davis pleaded guilty, and she did not participate in deliberations. There was nothing inherently prejudicial about this procedure, and, in any event, there is evidence that Lord agreed to it. This enumeration fails.

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Lord v. State, 820 S.E.2d 16, 304 Ga. 532 (Ga. 2018).

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