Miller v. State

Robert Miller was convicted by a Muscogee County jury of murder and other charges after a shooting outside two Columbus nightclubs left Antonio Robinson dead and wounded two other men. Evidence showed Miller and a co-defendant chased the victims' car and fired multiple shots from Miller's SUV, and Miller's girlfriend and a friend both said he admitted to shooting at the victims. On appeal, Miller argued the trial judge should have held a hearing before removing a juror who had been texting with the judge's secretary, to check whether the contact was harmless. The Supreme Court of Georgia found that Miller himself asked the judge to dismiss that juror and never asked for further questioning, so he could not raise this complaint on appeal, and no special review path applied. The court affirmed the convictions but fixed a sentencing mistake, wiping out a separate aggravated assault conviction that should have merged into the murder conviction.

The court held that Miller could not obtain plain-error review of the juror's dismissal because he asked the trial judge to excuse the juror and never sought further investigation, and Georgia law limits plain-error review to death penalty sentencing, certain judicial comments, jury charge errors, and evidentiary rulings, none of which applied here.

The ruling reinforces that defendants who ask a judge to take a specific action, like removing a juror, generally cannot later complain about that same action on appeal. It also shows the court's ongoing practice of catching sentencing merger errors even when neither side raises them.

Affirmed in part, vacated in part

1. The court first reviewed the trial record and found the evidence, including eyewitness accounts and two admitted statements in which Miller said he shot at the victims, was legally sufficient for a rational jury to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
2. The court explained that because Miller's own attorney asked the judge to dismiss the juror who had texted with the judge's secretary, and never requested further questioning or a hearing, Miller failed to preserve any objection to how the juror was removed for ordinary appellate review.
3. The court then considered whether plain-error review, a limited path allowing appellate courts to correct serious unobjected-to errors, could still apply, and found that in Georgia this review is available only for death-penalty sentencing, certain judicial comments, jury-charge errors, and evidentiary rulings in cases tried after January 1, 2013, none of which covered the juror issue here.
4. Because no exception applied, the court concluded Miller had no basis for reversal on the juror issue and declined to extend plain-error review to new categories of claims without direction from the General Assembly.
5. Reviewing the sentencing on its own, the court applied the rule that an aggravated assault conviction merges with a malice murder conviction for sentencing purposes when there is no evidence of a separate assault apart from the act that caused death, and found that rule applied here, requiring the aggravated assault conviction against Robinson to be vacated.

• murder conviction
• juror misconduct
• plain-error review
• sentence merger
• nightclub shooting