Sconyers v. State

901 S.E.2d 170

SCONYERS

v.The STATE.

S24A0139

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: April 30, 2024

Superior Court, Columbia County, J. Wade Padgett, Judge Donald Franklin Samuel, Garland, Samuel & Loeb, P.C., 3151 Maple Drive, N.E., Atlanta, Georgia 30305, 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, Bobby Lee Christine, District Attorney, Kevin Richard Majeska, A.D.A., Columbia Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, 7045 Evans Town Ctr Blvd, 4th Floor, Evans, Georgia 30809, for Appellee.

Ellington, Justice.

Charles Michael Sconyers appeals his convictions for malice murder and cruelty to children in the first degree in connection with the death of Chelsea Finch’s 23-month-old son, Lincoln Davitte, from blunt-force trauma to his skull.¹ The State presented evidence at trial showing that Sconyers and Finch lived together and that while Lincoln was at home in the sole care of Sconyers, Lincoln sustained a severe head injury that several medical experts testified was not consistent with a ground-level fall on the patio as described by Sconyers. Lincoln died later at the hospital. Sconyers contends that the trial court erred in four ways: repeatedly permitting the State to introduce evidence of previous injuries to Lincoln without cautioning the jury that the parties agreed that Sconyers did not cause those injuries; instructing the jury about "prior difficulties" between Sconyers and Lincoln without limiting what evidence qualified as prior difficulties; admitting hearsay statements allegedly made by Finch; and permitting the prosecution to impeach Finch improperly. For the reasons explained below, we affirm.

Sconyers had moved in with Lincoln and Finch, as well as her then-four-year-old daughter, near the end of 2018. On May 1, 2019, Finch had to work until 6:00 p.m. and asked Sconyers, who was not working his job as a firefighter and EMT because he had recently been injured, to pick up Lincoln from daycare while she went to the grocery store. Surveillance video footage showed Finch at the grocery store, and other video footage showed Sconyers leaving the daycare with Lincoln at 6:19 p.m. An investigator testified that he reviewed surveillance video footage from the daycare for the whole day and did not observe anything that could have contributed to Lincoln’s injuries. At some point, Sconyers called a friend and co-worker who was a paramedic and told him about an unconscious child with breathing problems. The co-worker told Sconyers to "[h]ang up and call 911." Sconyers called 911 at 6:36 p.m. and subsequently called Finch, screaming that she needed "to get home now" and that something happened to Lincoln. Sconyers said he did not know what happened. There was no evidence that anyone other than Sconyers was at the home with Lincoln at that time. Finch arrived before emergency responders and ran into the bedroom where Lincoln was lying on the bed unresponsive with a "bulge" on the right side of the top of his head, and Sconyers was trying to assess Lincoln as "an EMT should do" and "get his pupils to react." When they heard sirens, Finch picked up Lincoln, ran with him, and begged Sconyers to take him to the ambulance. Sconyers took Lincoln the rest of the way and was invited to ride in the ambulance to the hospital because Sconyers was an EMT.

The firefighters who first responded to the 911 call testified that Lincoln was unresponsive and not breathing adequately and that Sconyers told them Lincoln had a ground-level fall off a ledge onto concrete and had other bruises on his face and head because he had a problem with sleepwalking, One of the two paramedics, who arrived in an ambulance very soon after the firefighters, testified that Lincoln was "posturing," which typically happens after a severe closed-head injury, and that based on her training and expertise the injury did not appear to be caused by a ground-level fall. The witness testified that Sconyers told her "two stories" in the back of the ambulance: first, Lincoln was standing on a porch and fell about two to three feet off a ledge; and second, he fell on a "wheel chock"; and Sconyers later told another paramedic that Lincoln slipped on a door threshold and tripped and fell. The other paramedic also testified based on her experience that Lincoln’s skull fracture was not consistent with a fall of two to three feet. Sconyers kept repeating that it was his "fault" if anything happened to Lincoln.

Finch testified that at the hospital, after Lincoln had surgery, Sconyers told her that after getting home Lincoln wanted to go outside to play with chalk. Sconyers opened the outside door, went to the bathroom to take his knee brace off, and told Lincoln to go outside. Lincoln then "took off running," and Sconyers heard a loud thump and a cry and ran to find Lincoln lying out back on the concrete patio. Finch further testified that no one was at home with Sconyers and Lincoln at the time, that she did not know of any prior fracture of Lincoln’s skull, and that she was not aware of anything prior to the fatal incident that could have resulted in any type of brain injury to Lincoln.

Both parties presented medical experts who testified about Lincoln’s injuries. Extensive testimony from the State’s experts showed that the nature and severity of Lincoln’s fatal brain injury made it highly unlikely the injury was caused accidentally by a fall at ground level or from a low height. One of those experts testified that symptoms of that fatal injury would have appeared immediately after the impact, and Lincoln could not have continued to move normally after sustaining those injuries. The GBI medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Lincoln classified Lincoln’s death as a homicide because her examination and the medical records indicated that "non-accidental-inflicted trauma" caused the fatal injury and because the historical account of the incident provided by Sconyers did not explain Lincoln’s injuries. One of Sconyers’s medical experts testified that it was reasonably possible that Lincoln’s fatal injury resulted from an accident, in part because a prior head injury that caused a subdural hematoma made him "more prone to get a new one with more serious complications,"

Sconyers testified in his own defense as follows. He was a sergeant and advanced EMT with the Augusta Fire Department. The week before Lincoln’s death, Sconyers and his lieutenant went into a burning home to search for a little boy who was unaccounted for at the time, and Sconyers fell through the floor, injuring his knee. For that reason, Sconyers had a knee brace, was on leave, and was able to pick up Lincoln from daycare on May 1, 2019. When they arrived home, Sconyers told Lincoln he could play outside with chalk and opened the door for him. Sconyers went to use the bathroom and adjust his knee brace, and he told Lincoln to go outside. Lincoln "took off running," and Sconyers heard a thump and heard Lincoln "almost scream." Sconyers strapped his knee brace back on, "hobbled" outside as fast as he could, and found Lincoln lying "outside of [the] back patio." Lincoln turned his head "just a little bit" and became unresponsive. Sconyers stabilized Lincoln’s neck and body, took him inside, and immediately called 911.

1. Sconyers contends that the trial court erred by permitting the State repeatedly to introduce evidence of Lincoln’s previous injuries without cautioning the jury that the parties agreed that Sconyers did not cause those injuries.

Prior to the presentation of any evidence to the jury, Sconyers moved under OCGA § 24-4-404 (b) ("Rule 404 (b)") to exclude any testimony that Lincoln "had black eyes on two different occasions" in the months before his death. Rule 404 (b) requires the exclusion of "[e]vidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts" the defendant may have committed to prove the defendant’s bad character and show he acted "in conformity therewith" in committing the charged offense. Sconyers argued that Lincoln’s prior black-eye injuries fell under Rule 404 (b) because they were extrinsic to Lincoln’s death, and that they had to be excluded under that rule because the State could not prove that Sconyers caused the injuries. But the prosecutor argued that Lincoln’s prior injuries did not fall under Rule 404 (b) at all because they were intrinsic to the crime. See Roberts v. State, 315 Ga. 229, 235 (2) (a), 880 S.E.2d 501 (2022) ("The limitations and prohibition on ‘other acts’ evidence set out in [Rule]404 (b) do not apply to ‘intrinsic evidence.’ " (citation and punctuation omitted)). Specifically, the prosecutor argued that the State needed to introduce the prior injuries to explain the circumstances behind Lincoln’s prior head injuries, because Sconyers’s expected defense was that Lincoln’s prior head trauma - which caused the presence of both "old blood and new blood" in Lincoln’s brain, according to a defense expert - could have contributed to his death.² The trial court agreed with the prosecution that the prior injuries were admissible as intrinsic evidence - not falling under Rule 404 (b) - because they allowed the State to explain and rebut the testimony of Sconyers’s expert. See Johnson v. State, 312 Ga. 481, 491 (4), 863 S.E.2d 137 (2021) (Evidence is intrinsic when it is "necessary to complete the story of the crime." (citation and punctuation omitted)). The trial court also found that the evidence satisfied OCGA § 24-4-403 ("Rule 403").

[1] On appeal, Sconyers does not challenge the trial court’s ruling that the prior injuries were admissible as intrinsic evidence. Instead, he raises a two-part argument that he did not raise below: that the trial court allowed testimony about Lincoln’s...