The Georgia Supreme Court on Thursday sent a pointed message to Fulton County prosecutors who’d appealed a murder conviction that had been overturned: stop wasting precious resources, including our time.
The unusual ruling involved the case against drug dealer Dexter Beard. A jury found him guilty in December 2015 for the murder of fellow drug dealer Selemon Belai and the aggravated assault of Belai and three others. Beard was sentenced to life in prison.
Almost three years later, Senior Superior Court Judge Doris Downs, who presided over the trial, granted Beard a new trial. Downs did so under authority rarely used by trial judges but allowed under Georgia law — exercising her discretion as the so-called thirteenth juror.
Expressing concern about the weight of the evidence, Downs said the case was “filled with conflicting evidence and credibility concerns as to almost every eye witness and the chief investigating officer.”
Fulton prosecutors appealed Downs’ decision, but the state high court this week summarily rejected it. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Sarah Warren characterized the arguments brought by Fulton prosecutors as “bizarre.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice David Nahmias questioned the Fulton DA’s office for bringing its appeal, and six of the court’s other eight justices signed on to the concurrence as well.
In the future, Nahmias wrote, the state’s lawyers should “think hard about whether the appeal will amount to anything other than an unnecessary delay in the new trial and a waste of limited resources of the state, the publicly funded lawyers who represent most of the defendants in these cases and this court.”
In response, Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard had some strong words of his own.
“I must admit I am somewhat disturbed by the court’s flippant description of the state’s argument as ‘bizarre,’” he said. “What strikes the state as ‘bizarre’ are the actions of the trial judge who waited three years to deliver the granting of a new trial and who issued the ruling on her last day in office. That is ‘bizarre.’”
The court, Howard added, “decided to ridicule prosecutors for filing an objection to an outrageous process. Such action by the court, in my humble opinion, with all due respect — is bizarre.”
The killing came after a dispute on June 3, 2014, over a sidewalk dice game involving thousands of dollars and played in the early morning hours near the intersection of Auburn Avenue and Bell Street. According to testimony, Belai angrily accused Beard of cheating, leading to exchanges of gunfire. Belai later died of his wounds; Beard survived four gunshot wounds but required 10 surgeries, court records show.
In her 18-page order, Downs wrote that the four eyewitnesses called by the state “hold almost no credibility.” Also, the investigating detective conceded on the witness stand that two witnesses to the shooting could not say who fired the first shot.
In his concurrence, Nahmias, once the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, wrote that prior rulings by the state Supreme Court lead to the inescapable conclusion of what happens when state prosecutors appeal decisions like the one issued by Downs: They lose.
“If the verdict at trial depended at all on credibility determinations or the resolution of conflicting evidence, and the state just disagrees — however vehemently — with the trial court’s weighing of that evidence as the ‘thirteenth juror,’ the state has no realistic chance to prevail on appeal,” Nahmias said.
Howard also said he’d sent a letter Friday to Gov. Brian Kemp asking for his help in doing away with allowing judges to override juries while being the so-called thirteenth juror.
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