Smith v. State

313 Ga. 584

872 S.E.2d 262

SMITH

v.The STATE.

S22A0086

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: April 19, 2022

Sara S Becker, Conaway & Strickler, The Offices at the Four Seasons, Suite, 3000, 75 14th St. NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30309, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Michael Alexander Oldham, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Deborah D. Wellborn, A.D.A., Sherry Boston, District Attorney, Jason Matthew Rea, A.D.A., Dekalb County District Attorney's Office, 556 North McDonough Street, Decatur, Georgia 30030, for Appellee.

Warren, Justice.

Jared Kelvin Smith was convicted of malice murder and theft by taking in connection with the stabbing death of Ronald Roach.¹ Smith's sole contention on appeal is that the trial court erred in allowing the medical examiner to provide expert opinion testimony about blood-spatter evidence depicted in photographs of the crime scene. Seeing no reversible error, we affirm.

The evidence presented at Smith's trial showed the following. Roach's body was discovered in his apartment on the floor of his bedroom on the morning of June 28, 2018. A detective who responded to the crime scene found no indication of forced entry and observed blood inside the kitchen, on a light switch in the dining room just outside the kitchen, on the wall in the rear bedroom where Roach's body was found, and on the sheets and pillowcases in the bedroom, including a large amount of blood by the headboard. He observed Roach lying on the floor on his back beside the bed.

During his investigation, the detective discovered that Roach's vehicle was missing. According to the neighbors who lived in the apartment below Roach's, they heard an argument, loud noise, stomping, and screaming upstairs at around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. on the morning Roach was killed. They also heard the sound of someone running outside the apartment and a car engine cranking and a car driving away. When Smith was arrested and interviewed about a month later, he admitted to detectives that he went to Roach's apartment at around 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. on the night of Roach's murder, that Riki Albury came over 45 minutes to an hour later, and that Smith then had his girlfriend, Kessiah Rowe, come over to "hang out." But according to Smith, he and Rowe soon left, went to a gas station, and "went home by Ubers." After giving this statement, Smith gave detectives further information that they used to locate Roach's car, which previously had been seen at the house where Smith was living. Smith had told the other residents that he had bought the car.

At Smith's trial, evidence about Roach's bank account and records from Uber Technologies, Inc., were presented to show that Roach paid for rideshare services on the evening of June 27, 2018—including for a ride to a location near Roach's apartment for a man later identified as Albury. Evidence of a social media account in Roach's name and accessed on his computer showed conversations between Albury and Roach, who was posing as a female and invited Albury over for a sexual encounter.

Prentiss Green testified that on the night of June 27, 2018, Roach invited him to visit his apartment. When Green arrived, he went into Roach's bedroom, saw two young men and a woman engaged in sexual activity, and left after 20 minutes. Green later identified the two men as Smith and Albury from photographic lineups. A neighbor's statement to police officers after Roach's murder and a search of Green's phone corroborated Green's testimony about the circumstances of his visit to Roach's apartment. And a GBI forensic biologist testified that the one pair of underwear recovered at the scene of Roach's murder tested positive for DNA matching Roach, Albury, and Rowe.

Text messages extracted from Rowe's cell phone showed that on June 29, when Rowe asked Smith when she would see him again, he answered "[h]ow am I supposed to know I'm probably finna [sic] be in jail soon," and she responded "[f]or what you didn't do anything."

Rowe testified that on the night of Roach's murder, while she was in a relationship with Smith and pregnant with his child, Smith sent an Uber to bring her to Roach's apartment, where she engaged in sexual activity with Smith and Albury while Roach sat and watched nearby. After Roach made comments about Rowe that upset Smith, Rowe left with Smith and Albury and went to a gas station. When some men there were "disrespectful" to Rowe, Smith walked up to "defend" her, and she saw that he was holding a knife.

According to Rowe, she then went back to Roach's apartment with Smith and Albury. A heated argument ensued, and Smith struck Roach three times with a closed fist on the back of Roach's neck while Roach was sitting at his dining room table. Roach ran to his bedroom and tried to close the door, but Smith forced the door open. Rowe heard fighting, walked to the bedroom, saw blood on the bed, and observed Smith attacking Roach on one side of the bed. Albury sat and watched from the other side of the bed, and Rowe left the apartment to smoke outside.

After 15 to 20 minutes, Smith, Albury, and Rowe left in Roach's car. They drove to Rowe's house, where Smith changed his clothes and cleaned blood off his chest and knuckles. They next went to Smith's house, where Smith changed clothes a second time and Albury also changed clothes. Smith later dropped off Albury and Rowe at a motel room. During their stay at the motel, Albury and Rowe developed a romantic relationship, and Albury asked Rowe to marry him. Rowe testified that she did not tell the police everything that she ultimately testified about at trial because, at the time, she was nervous and scared about how Smith would react.

Dr. Christy Cunningham, a DeKalb County medical examiner who performed Roach's autopsy, was qualified as an expert in forensic pathology at trial. She testified that Roach's cause of death was multiple stab wounds, and she identified 38 stab wounds across Roach's body that were characteristic of wounds made by a knife. She also identified blunt-force trauma injuries on Roach's head and face.

When asked by the prosecutor, Dr. Cunningham provided testimony about the crime scene; the defense did not object. Specifically, she testified that a photograph depicting a blood-smear pattern that investigators found next to Roach's bedroom door would be consistent with "testimony that the victim was trying to keep the door closed and that someone forced their way in," and that another photograph depicting different blood-spatter patterns on another part of the bedroom wall was consistent with the victim being "forcefully slung in that direction" with "compression and drag." She further testified that another blood-spatter pattern on a wall depicted in a different photograph was "very suggestive of finger marks" or of the victim "plac[ing] a bloody hand on something and dr[agging] it across."

The prosecutor then asked Dr. Cunningham if the blood evidence at the crime scene would be consistent with testimony that the victim was first attacked in a different room, "ran to his bedroom and tried to close the door, that someone forced their way into the room and then an attack ensued ... and then [the victim] was stabbed to death in that area." Defense counsel objected on the ground that Dr. Cunningham was "not an expert as to blood," and the trial court overruled the objection. Dr. Cunningham then testified that the prosecutor's hypothetical was a "likely" or "possible" scenario based on the pattern of wounds on Roach's body, but that to determine whether Roach had died under such circumstances, she would need to evaluate other factors. With respect to Roach's cause of death, she testified that the stab wounds to the left side of Roach's chest were fatal because they severely damaged major vessels and the resulting blood loss would have been fatal within four to five minutes, and that the fatal injuries most likely were inflicted after the other stab wounds. She then testified that defensive injuries on Roach's arm and hand were consistent with "fending something off" and that the crime scene and Roach's injuries "could be" consistent with more than one attack.

After the jury convicted Smith of malice murder and theft by taking, he filed a motion for new trial, contending, among other things, that the trial court erred in allowing Dr. Cunningham to testify as an expert as to blood-spatter evidence. The trial court denied the motion, concluding that "[a]ny error in allowing the medical examiner to give this minimal opinion about blood spatter was harmless."

On appeal, Smith argues that the State did not lay the requisite foundation to qualify Dr. Cunningham as an expert in blood-spatter evidence, and that the admission of her blood-spatter testimony was not harmless. The State, in turn, concedes that it did not lay a foundation to qualify Dr. Cunningham as an expert in blood-spatter evidence at trial because she was never questioned about her training and experience in evaluating that type of evidence. It nonetheless contends that any error in admitting her testimony about the blood-spatter evidence was harmless. Assuming without deciding that the trial court erred...