Pittman v. State

901 S.E.2d 90

PITTMAN

v.The STATE.

S24A0013

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: April 30, 2024

Superior Court, Haralson County, Mark H, Murphy, Judge

David D. Marshall, Law Office of David D. Marshall, 2550 Sandy Plains Road, Suite 225, PMB 349, Marietta, Georgia 30066, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Clint Christopher Malcolm, Assistant Attorney General, Meghan Hobbs Hill, Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Matthew Blackwell Crowder, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Oliver Jackson Browning, Jr., District Attorney, Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, Polk County Courthouse #1, 100 Prior Street, Room 204, Cedartown, Georgia 30125, for Appellee.

Boggs, Chief Justice.

Appellant Randy Leon Pittman, Jr., challenges his convictions for malice murder and arson in connection with the shooting and burning death of Natoshia Smith. Appellant contends that the evidence was legally insufficient to support his convictions because the evidence failed to sufficiently identify Smith’s skeletal remains; that the trial court erred in denying his motion to disqualify the District Attorney; that the trial court abused its discretion in prohibiting him from asking witnesses about other fires that occurred while he was incarcerated; and that the trial court erred in denying a motion for mistrial. We conclude that the forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony was sufficient to identify Smith as the victim and that there was no error in refusing to disqualify the District Attorney based on the District Attorney’s prior representation of Appellant, where it was undisputed that the prior representation ended several years before, and was completely unrelated to, the murder prosecution. We also conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in excluding evidence of other fires because the evidence was not relevant. Finally, we conclude that Appellant did not preserve for appeal his claim related to the denial of his motion for mistrial. Accordingly, we affirm.¹

1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence presented at trial showed the following. Appellant and Smith were dating prior to her death. On the afternoon of July 23, 2015, Appellant was at the home of his co-indictee Marie Southers when he learned from other friends that Smith had stolen items from the friends’ home. Appellant told Southers that he could not take Smith anywhere without her "stealing, lying, or just intentionally making him look bad." At Appellant’s request, Southers telephoned Smith to ask her to come over, and then Appellant picked Smith up and brought her to Southers’s home at about 3:30 p.m. When Smith arrived, she appeared to be high on methamphetamine, and Southers asked Smith to go into a bedroom. As Smith did so, she dropped a syringe full of methamphetamine on the floor, which angered Southers because Southers’s children were present. Southers told her children to go next door to their grandparents’ home and then followed Smith into the bedroom, and Appellant walked outside to take a phone call. Smith told Southers that Appellant had "forced himself on her" and forced her to do drugs. When Appellant returned to the bedroom, Southers told him about Smith’s accusations. Smith accused Southers of lying, and the two women got into a fist fight, with Southers punching Smith three times in the face and then telling Smith to leave. As Appellant and Smith left in Appellant’s car, Appellant told Smith to lie down in the back seat so no one would see her with him.

Sometime after midnight, Appellant called Southers and said he was at his father’s house and needed gas. Southers and her husband took a one-gallon can of gas to Appellant’s father’s house, saw Appellant and Smith in Appellant’s car, left the gas can by the car, and then returned home. Several hours later, Appellant called Southers and said there was an issue that they needed to discuss, but he did not say what it was. Appellant asked her to come to a location on Coppermine Road and provided directions. Southers arrived at that location about 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. and saw Appellant’s car parked in front of an unoccupied and dilapidated house. Appellant was standing by the open front passenger door; he was holding a gun and trying to force Smith out of the car. The gun was a "little 22" with a pearl-colored handle that Southers had seen Appellant carry before. Appellant appeared angry and told Smith that he did not know why she had to make him look bad all the time, that he had done nothing but try to be good to her, and that he could not take her anywhere. While pointing the gun at Smith, Appellant forced her to remove her belongings from the car and to walk into the house. Southers followed and remained in the doorway of the house. Appellant was carrying a gas can that appeared to be the one Southers and her husband had taken to Appellant. Smith pleaded, "Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this," and Appellant responded that he had made her a promise, she knew what the promise was, and she knew that he was a man of his word. Appellant put the gun in his boot, grabbed Smith’s arm when she tried to walk out of the house, taped her arms behind her, put her on the floor, taped her legs, dragged her across the floor, and yanked her to her knees. Smith again pleaded, "Please don’t do this." Appellant then walked behind Smith, and Southers heard the gun cock, saw Appellant point the gun at the back of Smith’s head, and heard the gun fire. Smith fell face first onto the floor. Appellant told Southers to leave, and Southers drove home. About three hours later, Appellant called Southers, said "she’s dead," and then hung up.

A few days later, Appellant came to Southerns home and told Southers that he had put Smith’s belongings on top of her and set Smith and her possessions on fire; that Smith was alive when he set her on fire; and that he threw the gun into Morgan Lake. He also told Southers, "The more you kill the easier it gets." In a later conversation, Appellant told Southers that he returned to the abandoned house two times; that a pill bottle that he had placed in the fire had not burned; that the bottle contained a prescription label for Smith’s former boyfriend, Matthew Hurston, and could point police toward Hurston instead of him as a suspect; and that he put Smith’s phone in Hurston's house. Appellant also said that he was worried the police would find his DNA in Smith’s body.

The crime scene was not discovered until August 29, 2015, when a man who had been looking for scrap wood found a skull and other bones in front of the home; he called 911. During the ensuing investigation, law enforcement officers collected multiple human bones spread on the ground outside of the house, including a jawbone with a metal plate in it and a skull with what appeared to be a bullet hole in it. Several of the bones had charring on them. The officers also discovered evidence of a fire that had burned through the floor in one room of the house. Officers collected a partially burned medicine bottle for a prescription for Matthew Hurston from that room. An investigator with the Haralson County fire department concluded that the fire was intentionally set using a flammable liquid that had been poured between the entryway of the room and the interior of the room. During his investigation, he searched the ground under the hole in the floor and recovered human bones and hair, a necklace, and a piece of wire that appeared to come from an underwire bra. A forensic chemist testified that testing completed on wood and carpet samples taken from the scene of the fire indicated the presence of gasoline.

Smith’s remains were initially identified by a dentist who treated Smith in 2012 after her jaw had been surgically repaired after Hurston had hit her and broke her jaw. At trial, the dentist testified that the jawbone with the metal plate found on August 29 was Smith’s. The medical examiner testified that she compared ante-mortem dental x-rays of Smith with post-mortem x-rays of the jawbone found at the scene and concluded that the jawbone found at the scene was Smith’s. The medical examiner also testified that the skull had a hole in it that was consistent with a gunshot wound, and she recovered a bullet from the right side of the skull. The medical examiner determined that the cause of death was a gunshot to the skull "with burning." A firearms expert testified that the bullet recovered from the skull was a .22 caliber. The gun that fired the bullet was never found.

In addition to Southers’s testimony, the State presented several witnesses who testified to inculpatory statements made by Ap- pellant before the details of the crime scene were made public. One of those witnesses was Adrian Williamson, who was incarcerated with Appellant in the Carroll County Jail before Appellant was arrested for Smith’s murder and who testified about statements Appellant made to him in December 2015 or January 2016. According to Williamson, Appellant related a story about a murder in which an unnamed man shot a woman in the back of the head with a pearl-handled .22 caliber gun and burned her. Appellant said that the woman had an ex-boyfriend who had broken her jaw previously, but the ex-boyfriend had been in jail at the time of the murder, and police cleared him. In connection with telling this story, Appellant asked Williamson how long DNA would stay in a body if the body had been scattered by animals. He also said that "a guy" had thrown a pearl-handled .22-caliber gun into a lake and that if the gun was ever found, "I’m "f**ked."

Investigator Bernie Reece, III, of the Haralson County Sheriff’s office interviewed Appellant at the Carroll County jail. He testified that Appellant said that he and Smith had dated until the end of June 2015 and that the last time Appe...