Isaac v. State

901 S.E.2d 535

ISAAC

v.The STATE.

S24A0014

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: May 14, 2024

Superior Court, DeKalb County, Asha F. Jackson, Judge

Jerry W. Chappell, II, Georgia Public Defender Council, 270 Washington Street, S.W., #6080, Atlanta, Georgia 30334, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Clint Christopher Malcolm, Assistant Attorney General, Meghan Hobbs Hill, Assistant Attorney General, Elizabeth Haase Brock, Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Stephany Julissa Luttrell, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Deborah D. Wellborn, A.D.A., Sherry Boston, District Attorney, Harry Steven Ruth, Deputy Chief A.D.A., Thomas L. Williams, DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, 556 North McDonough Street, Suite 700, Decatur, Georgia 30030, for Appellee.

McMillian, Justice.

Appellant Kenneth Maurice Isaac was convicted of malice murder, among other crimes, for the shooting death of Reginald Roberts.¹ On appeal, Isaac claims that his trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance by refusing to allow him to testify in his own defense and that the trial court erred by declining to instruct the jury on impeachment of a witness through bias toward a party. For the reasons that follow, his claims fall, so we affirm.

1. The evidence at trial showed the following. On April 20, 2014, Roberts was found dead, nude from the waist down, in a wooded area connecting two apartment complexes, Kensington Manor and Southern Pines.

The previous day, April 19, Roberts and two others stole vehicles from an airport, including a newer-model, black Ford Mus- tang. According to his girlfriend Keneisha Williams, Roberts returned home that afternoon, and then left in the evening to exchange a silver gun in his possession for a black gun. Williams testified that in the days leading up to that evening, Roberts had tried to exchange his silver gun by meeting with "someone named Chad." Williams did not know who "Chad" was, but recounted from her conversations with Roberts that "Chad" lived with his aunt, and that before April 19, Roberts had gone to the aunt’s apartment to find "Chad" but did not find him there. After Roberts left on the evening of April 19, Williams did not see him again.

That evening, Kenyatte Stephenson, a resident of Kensington Manor, saw Roberts near her apartment talking with a man for about twenty minutes and appearing "mad." In the days prior to April 19, Roberts had called Stephenson a number of times looking for Isaac. The same evening, Stephenson also saw Isaac, whom she had known for a year by then, at her apartment. Isaac had a black gun that evening, and he left between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. to go to his aunt’s house in Southern Pines. Stephenson heard two gun shots that night, though she did not know what time she heard the shots.

The same night, Tiffany Farley, a resident of Southern Pines who had known Isaac for years, went with Isaac’s girlfriend to a local bar. According to Farley, at about 11:30 p.m. or midnight, she saw Isaac at the bar, and he told her: "I got a body, and he is naked from the waist down in the cut" and "[y]ou will see, just wait until in the morning." At trial, Farley described the "cut" as an area that people traversed to go between Kensington Manor and Southern Pines.

The next day, April 20, Isaac attended a cookout with family and friends, including his cousin Sequoia Isaac² and her brother Kenyara Bolton. According to Sequoia, Isaac told her at the cookout that he had shot Roberts twice in the head. Sequoia also saw Isaac "near" and "go into" a newer-model black Mustang. Bolton also saw Isaac standing next to a newer "black or gray" Mustang.

That same day, Quantavious Hurt, a teenager who often visited Kensington Manor and Southern Pines, discovered Roberts’s body, buttocks exposed, in the "cut" between the two apartment complexes, and notified police. Hurt testified that in the days leading up to the discovery, Roberts had come to the apartments looking for Isaac and thought Isaac had his gun; Roberts went to Isaac’s aunt’s home and asked her about the gun. About three or four days after he found Roberts dead, Hurt also saw Isaac in a "purplish blackish" Mustang.

After Hurt notified police, law enforcement responded to the crime scene. Richard Bowen, a forensic death investigator, found a gunshot wound in Roberts’s neck. Based in part on the undisturbed dirt near Roberts’s body, Bowen concluded that Roberts was nude from the waist down when he was shot and that right after getting shot, he fell where he was later found. Dr. Gerald Thomas Gowitt, the medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Roberts, also noted the gunshot wound on the right side of his neck, and concluded that the bullet path was "right to left, front to back, and slightly downward" and that whoever had shot Roberts "couldn’t have been behind him."

On May 4, 2014, law enforcement found the black Ford Mustang that Roberts had stolen. Nope of the latent prints they found on the car matched Isaac’s fingerprints, but Dr. Torry Passmore, the expert in fingerprint examination and analysis who had compared Isaac’s fingerprints with those on the, car, testified that fingerprints on a car could be wiped or washed down. Another law enforcement officer also indicated that he and those who towed the car had to have touched it, that the location where he had found the car was "out in the elements," and that "it rain[ed] when the car had gotten wet."

Also that May, law enforcement arrested and interviewed Isaac. The audio recordings of two interviews were admitted at trial and played for the jury. In the first interview, conducted on May 24, Isaac told police that at the time of Roberts’s shooting, he was in Florida. But in the second interview, conducted on May 29, Isaac told police that on April 19, he went to the "cut" with Sequoia’s boyfriend, Kenyatta Frazier,³ and saw Frazier come out directly behind Roberts and fire at Roberts three times. In that interview, Isaac stated he had never been in a black Mustang.

Isaac also told police that he was a leader in the Bloods gang with about 170 members under him and indicated that he could order members to handle those who disrespected him. At trial, Investigator Wayne Pinckney, an expert in street gang investigations, testified that gang leaders maintain their leadership by commanding respect: gangs always respond to a "disrespectful situation," and members often talk about their crimes to instill fear and command an area. Investigator Pinckney testified that those who violate a gang’s norms can be "discipline[d]" even by murder, and recalled Isaac speaking to him about being "in charge of" people who committed violations. Hurt, the teenager who had found Roberts’s body—and who had spent time with Isaac and had often visited Kensington Manor and Southern Pines, sites for gang activity—testified that it was "kind of a violation" for Roberts to have asked Isaac’s aunt about a gun, because, in Hurt’s words, "you don’t never actually go to somebody’s house or any person house and say something about the gun or anything because that kind of could spook them or scare them[.]"

Having seen situations where criminals ordered victims to strip at gunpoint to humiliate them, Investigator Pinckney believed that whoever killed Roberts likely sought to humiliate him and send a message, because Roberts was found naked from the waist down in a frequently used area and without signs of sexual abuse.

2. Isaac claims his trial counsel provided constitutionally ineffective assistance by preventing him from testifying. The record shows that after the State rested, the trial court told Isaac that he needed to decide whether to testify and took a ten-minute recess to give Isaac the chance to confer with his trial counsel on whether to testify. After the recess, counsel announced that she "had the opportunity to speak with" Isaac, and Isaac himself announced that he was not going to testify. The defense then presented its case and rested after calling two witnesses. However, at the motion for new trial hearing, counsel and Isaac each testified that after the defense presented its last witness and right before the defense rested, Isaac told counsel he wanted to testify and she told him "no." Isaac indicated that this exchange also occurred in the ten-minute recess right after the State rested. The trial court, in its order denying Isaac’s motion for new trial; "decline[d] to credit the testimony of [Isaac] or trial counsel" and stated that "[n]othing in the record indicates [Isaac] ever expressed any desire to testify." Yet on appeal, Isaac maintains that he expressed to counsel a desire to testify and she told him "no," and that by doing so, she provided constitutionally ineffective assistance.

[1–4] To succeed on his ineffective assistance claim, Isaac must show that his trial counsel performed deficiently and that the deficiency prejudiced the defense. See Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 (III), 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). To show deficiency, Isaac must show that counsel "performed [her] duties in an objectively unreasonable way, considering all the circumstances and in the light of prevailing professional norms." Evans v. State, 315 Ga. 607, 611 (2) (b), 884 S.E.2d 334 (2023). To show prejudice, Isaac "must establish a reasonable probability that, in the absence of counsel’s deficient performance, the result of the trial would have been different." Rashad v. State, 318 Ga. 199, 208 (3), 897 S.E.2d 760 (2024) (citation and punctuation omitted). "If [Isaac] fails to make a sufficient showing on one part of the Strickland test, we need not address the other part." Washington v. State, 313 Ga. 771, 773 (3), 873 S.E.2d 132 (2022).

Isaac argues that counsel performed deficiently by telling him "no" after he asked to testify, because by doing so she thwarted the...