Taylor v. State

687 S.E.2d 409, 286 Ga. 328, 2009 Fulton County D. Rep. 3472, 2009 Ga. LEXIS 678

• Court: Supreme Court of Georgia
• Decided: November 2, 2009
• Docket: S09G0881
• Status: Published

Opinions

Melton, Justice.

After being involved in a motor vehicle collision that resulted in the death of James Oliver, Danielle Taylor was indicted for, among other things, involuntary manslaughter, first degree homicide by vehicle, and serious injury by vehicle.¹ A jury acquitted Taylor on the homicide by vehicle count, acquitted her on a charge of following too closely, and found her guilty on all remaining counts. Despite the jury’s acquittal of Taylor on the homicide by vehicle charge, however, the trial court then decided after the verdict to treat the involuntary manslaughter charge against Taylor as a second count of first degree vehicular homicide, and thereafter sentenced Taylor to fifteen years for first degree homicide by vehicle. The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s entry of a conviction for first degree homicide by vehicle and remanded the case to the trial court for re-sentencing on the charge of serious injury by vehicle. This Court granted Taylor’s petition for a writ of certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals erred in directing the trial court to re-sentence Taylor for the offense of serious injury by vehicle where the trial jury acquitted Taylor of homicide by vehicle, but also found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter based on the same set of facts involving a single victim. As explained more fully below, because the record reveals that the involuntary manslaughter count of the indictment was not merely a second count of first degree homicide by vehicle, we agree with the Court of Appeals that the trial court improperly treated the jury’s finding of guilt on the involuntary manslaughter count as a finding of guilt on an additional homicide by vehicle count. We therefore affirm.

Here, the trial court inappropriately engaged in after-the-fact speculation in an effort to make sense of the jury verdict. Again, the jury acquitted Taylor of vehicular homicide, but found Taylor guilty of involuntary manslaughter. The difficulty arose from the fact that the conviction for involuntary manslaughter was for an offense that should never have been charged. The proper charge, under these circumstances, would have been for vehicular homicide only, the charge for which Taylor was acquitted. See State v. Foster, 141 Ga. App. 258, 260 (1) (233 SE2d 215) (1977), aff'd, 239 Ga. 302 (236 SE2d 644) (1977) (“As a result of the enactment ... of the vehicular homicide statute . . . vehicular homicides which formerly were prosecuted as for involuntary manslaughter must now be prosecuted under the new statute.”).

The State would attempt to justify the trial court’s ruling by concluding that the trial court was allowed to treat the indicted involuntary manslaughter charge as a de facto charge of homicide by vehicle resulting from reckless driving — even after the jury had expressly acquitted Taylor of vehicular homicide. However, there are several problems with this conclusion: (1) it is clear that all charges were indicted, tried, and charged as distinct and separate offenses; (2) by re-casting the impermissible involuntary manslaughter charge as an ostensibly proper vehicular homicide charge, the trial court allowed and gave life to an inappropriate prosecution for both involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide; and (3) by recasting the involuntary manslaughter charge as a second charge for vehicular homicide after the verdict, the trial court usurped the role of the jury.

The seven-count indictment here specifically charged the defendant with seven separate crimes. Indeed, in its charge to the jury, the trial court explicitly instructed the jury that the “defendant is charged with a crime against the laws of this state and in this Indictment actually seven individual crimes.”2 One of these individual crimes was involuntary manslaughter, which the trial court emphasized was not a second count of homicide by vehicle, but rather a completely independent charge. In its charge, the trial court stated that “with regard to [the involuntary manslaughter count] of the indictment, I charge you that a person commits involuntary manslaughter when the person causes the death of another human being without any intention to do so by the commission of the offense of reckless driving.” Notably, the court did not use this same language when defining the offense of homicide by vehicle for the jury. In fact, with respect to homicide by vehicle, the court instructed the jury on additional elements that it had to consider in order to find Taylor guilty of that individual crime. Specifically, the trial court charged the jury that “[a] person commits the offense of homicide by vehicle when without malice [a] forethought that person causes the death of another person by driving a motor vehicle in reckless disregard for the safety of persons and property at an unsafely high speed while failing to maintain her lane.” Contrary to any indication that the State intended for the involuntary manslaughter count to merely be a second count of homicide by vehicle, the record reveals that the State intended for the jury to treat the involuntary manslaughter count of the indictment as an entirely separate crime from homicide by vehicle by allowing the jury to be instructed that it was in fact a separate crime with different elements. Thus, it cannot be said, as the dissent claims, that the jury “[o]bviously [entered] two homicide [by vehicle] verdicts,” because the jury was specifically instructed to treat involuntary manslaughter as an entirely separate offense from homicide by vehicle.

In this regard, as the State correctly conceded, and as the Court of Appeals correctly concluded, the State could not maintain a prosecution under both the involuntary manslaughter statute and the homicide by vehicle statute for a death that resulted from reckless driving. See Foster, supra, 141 Ga. App. at 260 (1). By allowing the jury to treat involuntary manslaughter as an entirely separate offense in the same trial in which the defendant was tried for vehicular homicide, however, the trial court permitted the State to do exactly what it was prohibited from doing — prosecute a defendant under both the vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter statutes for a death that resulted from reckless driving.

The trial court compounded its error by then usurping the jury’s role and attempting to re-cast the jury’s finding of guilt on involuntary manslaughter as a finding of guilt on vehicular homicide — the very crime that the jury had acquitted the defendant of committing and that the trial court’s own instructions indicated was a “separate” crime from involuntary manslaughter.³ The Court of Appeals properly held that this was impermissible. See Foster, supra. Because the “homicide by vehicle” conviction based on a finding of guilt on “involuntary manslaughter” was impermissible, the Court of Appeals properly vacated that conviction, which left open only the question whether a serious injury by vehicle conviction could still remain in light of the evidence presented at trial. Because we agree with the Court of Appeals that the evidence supported the jury’s verdict on the serious injury by vehicle count (see Miller v. State, 275 Ga. 730 (1) (571 SE2d 788) (2002) (aggravated battery conviction upheld where victim did not die instantaneously)), we further agree with the Court of Appeals that the case must be remanded to the trial court for resentencing on that count.

Judgment affirmed.

All the Justices concur, except Carley, P. J., and Nahmias, J., who dissent.

1 A more detailed account of the facts surrounding the collision and the charges brought against Taylor can be found in the Court of Appeals opinion relating to this case, Taylor v. State, 295 Ga. App. 689 (673 SE2d 7) (2009).

2 The trial court reiterated the separate nature of the offenses by re-charging the jury in this exact language in response to one of the jury’s questions.

3 In this connection, contrary to the dissent’s assertions, this case has nothing to do with any exception to the abolition of the inconsistent verdict rule. Indeed, this Court need not speculate about the intentions of the jury in rendering its verdict in order to determine whether it was appropriate for the trial court to enter a conviction on an offense for which Taylor was specifically acquitted.