Georgia high court overturns day care murder conviction a second time

For the second time in less than a dozen years, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a former babysitter accused of killing an infant at her unlicensed day care.

Tuesday’s decision means Fulton County prosecutors must decide again whether to retry Maria Owens in the 2011 death of 11-month-old Jaylen Kelly.

In 2020, Owens was convicted of murder in Jaylen’s death for a second time, along with aggravated assault and cruelty to children.

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Charlie Bethel wrote the majority opinion overturning a babysitter's conviction a second time. (Natrice Miller/AJC 2024)

But jurors were given incorrect instructions when the judge told them they couldn’t convict her of both involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault, the Supreme Court said.

“We do not lightly reverse Owens’s felony murder conviction for a second time,” Justice Charlie Bethel wrote in the majority opinion. “Still, we have no trouble concluding the trial court plainly erred when it answered the jury question.”

Authorities said Jaylen died three days shy of his first birthday. The child seemed fine before being dropped off at Owens’ home in Fairburn, according to case files. He had been walking around that morning and playing with his siblings, his parents testified at trial.

But they got a call from Owens later that day telling them Jaylen was having trouble breathing. He was taken to one hospital, then flown to another, where he died.

The day care runner told police Jaylen was congested and that she “patted” him on his side to make him cough, court records show.

At trial, however, the medical examiner testified the cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the torso caused by a “very hard blow,” case records show. Experts said Jaylen suffered major internal bleeding, and that the fracture in his back would have left him unable to walk.

In the first trial, in 2013, Owens was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and felony murder, an ancillary charge prosecutors can use when someone dies during the commission of a felony.

At the time, Georgia jurisprudence held that someone could not be found guilty on two separate charges for the same act if one charge required intent and the other relied instead on negligence. Using that standard, the justices in November 2014 overturned Owens’ conviction.

Justices did away with that precedent in 2015, but the Fulton judge overseeing Owens’ second trial incorrectly instructed the jury to follow the old standard, despite objections from her attorneys, according to Tuesday’s ruling.

“The charge was erroneous and harmful as to Owens’s homicide charges, because we rejected the mutually-exclusive-mental-states rule years before Owens’s retrial,” Bethel wrote.

Bethel acknowledged the complicated case is “a bit of a mess,” and explained “that’s largely our fault” given the court’s prior decision on mutually exclusive verdicts.

Owens’ attorney, Kyle Winchester, said his client’s case is unique considering it’s been to the Georgia Supreme Court twice and the law was changed between both appeals.

The boy’s death is tragic, he said, but Owens has maintained her innocence from the beginning.

The way the trial judge applied the law during the 2020 trial removed the jury’s ability to even consider the lesser-included involuntary manslaughter charge. As a result, Owens was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, he said.

“On the overall question about whether the jury instructions about intent and negligence were wrong, they absolutely got that right,” Winchester said of thecourt’s decision.

The former day care operator can be retried on the felony murder charge because the justices held there was sufficient evidence to support guilty verdicts on those counts. A majority also allowed her child cruelty conviction to stand, reasoning “the erroneous charge did not impact that conviction.”

But the sentence for Owens’ child cruelty count was vacated because it is largely contingent on the resolution of her more serious murder charge.

In a partial dissent, Justice Carla Wong McMillian said each of Owens’ counts should have been reversed.