Steplight v. State

800 S.E.2d 548, 301 Ga. 272, 2017 WL 2332651, 2017 Ga. LEXIS 441
CourtSupreme Court of Georgia
DecidedMay 30, 2017
DocketS17A0296
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 800 S.E.2d 548 (Steplight 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
Steplight v. State, 800 S.E.2d 548, 301 Ga. 272, 2017 WL 2332651, 2017 Ga. LEXIS 441 (Ga. 2017).

Opinion

HINES, Chief Justice.

Samuel Steplight appeals his convictions and sentences for felony murder, possession of a knife during the commission of a crime, and terroristic threats, all in connection with the death of Norma Jean Mobley. For the reasons that follow, we affirm in part and reverse in part.1

Construed to support the verdicts, the evidence showed that Steplight and Mobley had a romantic relationship, with Steplight living in Mobley’s home until the relationship ended in early October 2010, at which point Steplight moved out. A week later, Moses Slaughter began to live in Mobley’s home; Mobley had previously suffered a stroke and had no use of her left hand, had limited use of her left leg, and usually used a cane or other aid to walk.

On the night of October 24, 2010, Steplight went to a county law enforcement center, where he met a deputy sheriff; Steplight told the deputy that he had thoughts of killing Mobley and her “new man,” as well as himself, and said that he wanted to go to the Veterans Administration Hospital for assistance. The deputy sheriff took Steplight to that hospital and left him with the hospital staff.

Shortly before noon on November 3, 2010, Mobley and a neighbor, LaGrand Grimes, walked to a nearby store. While Mobley was gone, Slaughter lay on a couch in the living room of Mobley’s home; during that time, Steplight entered the dwelling through the unlocked kitchen door. Hearing the sounds of entry in the kitchen, Slaughter rose from the couch and went to the entryway between the kitchen and living room, where he encountered Steplight, who said: “My [273]*273name is Sam. You’re leaving here today one way or another.” When Slaughter asked Steplight what he was doing in Mobley’s home, Steplight brought his right hand from behind his back, and appeared to hold a .22 caliber pistol in it. Slaughter left Mobley’s home, and shortly encountered her and Grimes on their return from the store. Slaughter told them that Steplight was in Mobley’s home, and Mobley called 911. When law enforcement officers arrived, they determined that Steplight was not in the home; Slaughter told Mobley to remain in the house with the doors locked, and he went to a county law enforcement center in an attempt to secure a restraining order against Steplight, or a warrant for his arrest, but he was unable to do so as paperwork from the law enforcement officers’ visit had not yet been filed.

During Slaughter’s absence, Mobley asked Grimes to go to the nearby home of David Campbell to see if Steplight was there. Grimes found Steplight at Campbell’s home, and Steplight appeared to have been drinking; Campbell and another neighbor, Arthur Adams, were also there. Grimes heard Steplight say to her that, “if he can’t have her no one can ’cause that’s the man from the soup kitchen,” which was a reference to Slaughter. Adams also heard Steplight “talking about if he couldn’t have [Mobley]... wasn’t nobody else going to have her.” Grimes asked Steplight for Mobley’s cell phone number which he supplied; she then left Campbell’s home and telephoned Mobley, telling her that Steplight was at Campbell’s residence.

After Slaughter was unable to secure a restraining order or warrant for Step light’s arrest, he returned to Mobley’s home, although the journey was lengthy, as he had to walk and take a bus; during the trip, he called Mobley’s cell phone, but she did not answer. When he arrived at Mobley’s home, he noticed a strange jacket on the back porch; inside the home, he found Mobley’s body on the kitchen floor. Mobley had been fatally stabbed and cut with knife blades at least 15 times, suffering particularly injurious wounds to her chest; she also had slicing wounds to her palm and fingers of her right hand. In the kitchen sink were two bloody knives; a knife with a severely bent serrated blade, and an unserrated knife with a 5.5 inch blade. The jacket on the back porch contained a wallet with documents that identified Steplight. Later that night, Steplight went to a county law enforcement center and stated through an intercom at the front door that he wanted to turn himself in; by the time a clerk searched for warrants for him, and found none, Steplight had left. On November 6, 2010, he went to a law enforcement center and surrendered himself to an officer, saying that he had killed Mobley, and naming the street on which she had lived.

[274]*274Steplight testified in his defense; he admitted to being Mobley’s killer, and said that in the days before the killing, he met several times with Mobley, they resolved to renew their relationship, and Mobley stated that she would send Slaughter away from her home. He further testified that: on November 3, 2010, he knocked on the door to Mobley’s home, and she let him in; he and Mobley spoke for about five minutes; he inquired why she continued to allow Slaughter to live there after telling him they would get back together; he said “you been flip-flopping me”; she became nervous and went into the bedroom; Steplight heard clicks and the sound of a lighter, by which he concluded she was smoking crack cocaine; after she emerged from the bedroom and their conversation continued, she became “furious” and “wild,” and “had a wild look in her eye”; Steplight decided to remove his possessions from the home, and put them on the street to embarrass Mobley; he began to remove the bed from the bedroom, stopped doing so, and started to leave the home; Mobley became belligerent and unfavorably compared his sexual prowess to that of Slaughter; she spat on him; he became “furiously mad”; he “just blanked out and . . . stabbed her and . . . stabbed her”; when the first knife he used to stab Mobley became bent and ineffective, he took a second knife and stabbed her several other times; and, after killing Mobley, he went to a nearby abandoned apartment for several hours, made an attempt to turn himself in to law enforcement officials, and then returned to the abandoned apartment.

1. Steplight contends that the evidence was insufficient to authorize the jury to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime of terroristic threats. See Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307 (99 SCt 2781, 61 LE2d 560) (1979). He was charged with making terroristic threats “in reckless disregard of the risk of causing terror to . . . Mobley,” based on his statements of November 3, 2010 expressing that if he could not “have her,” he would not allow anyone else to. See OCGA § 16-11-37.2 Pretermitting whether these statements qualify as threats under OCGA § 16-11-37, they were made to Grimes and Adams; the statements were not made to Mobley, were not made in [275]*275her presence, and were not made in circumstances that would allow an inference that she would directly hear them. However,

[t]he crime of making terroristic threats focuses solely on the conduct of the accused and is completed when the threat is communicated to the victim with the intent to terrorize. [Cit.] That the message was not directly communicated to the victim would not alone preclude a conviction where the threat is submitted in such a way as to support the inference that the speaker intended or expected it to be conveyed to the victim. [Cit.]

Armour v. State, 265 Ga. App.

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Bluebook (online)
800 S.E.2d 548, 301 Ga. 272, 2017 WL 2332651, 2017 Ga. LEXIS 441, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/steplight-v-state-ga-2017.