Thompson v. State

Timmy Thompson was convicted by a Tift County jury of felony murder after his wife, Peggy, was found dead with injuries consistent with strangulation and blunt-force trauma, despite Thompson's claims that she had fallen while drunk. At trial, Peggy's adult children and stepdaughter testified about years of violence Thompson inflicted on them and on Peggy, testimony the trial judge allowed under a rule governing evidence of other acts. Thompson appealed, arguing the other-acts testimony was irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial, and that the trial court should not have let those witnesses stay in the courtroom and hear each other's testimony before they testified. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed on both points. It found the testimony relevant to intent and to disproving accident, and it found the witnesses properly exempted from the usual rule requiring witnesses to be kept out of the courtroom, because Georgia's Crime Victims' Bill of Rights let the trial judge treat Peggy's children and stepdaughter as victims or immediate family members. The conviction was affirmed.

The trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting testimony about Thompson's prior violence against his children and stepchildren to show intent and absence of accident, nor in exempting those witnesses, as victims or immediate family members of the deceased under the Crime Victims' Bill of Rights, from the usual rule requiring witnesses to be excluded from the courtroom before testifying.

The ruling confirms that prosecutors in Georgia domestic violence and murder cases can use a defendant's history of violence against other family members to prove intent, and that victims' family members can watch trial proceedings under the Crime Victims' Bill of Rights even before they testify.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the three-part test for admitting evidence of other acts under Georgia's Rule 404(b) (O.C.G.A. § 24-4-404(b)), which normally bars using a person's other bad acts to show they acted the same way this time, but allows such evidence for purposes like proving intent.
2. Because Thompson denied ever harming his wife and suggested her injuries came from a drunken fall, his intent to commit aggravated assault was disputed, so testimony showing he had the same violent intent toward other family members was relevant to something other than his general bad character.
3. Weighing the evidence's value against unfair prejudice, the court found the state's need for the evidence was strong since there were no eyewitnesses to the death, the abuse described was similar to the crime charged, and the harm was no more than what naturally comes with evidence of real misconduct, so the trial judge's decision to admit it was not an abuse of discretion.
4. Because the children and stepdaughter gave firsthand testimony about violence they experienced or witnessed, a jury could find by a preponderance of the evidence that Thompson actually committed those other acts, satisfying the third part of the test.
5. On sequestration, the court explained that Georgia's Crime Victims' Bill of Rights (O.C.G.A. § 17-17-9) lets a trial judge excuse victims and their immediate family members from the usual rule that keeps witnesses out of the courtroom until they testify, and here the children and stepdaughter counted as both victims and immediate family of the deceased wife.
6. Because none of the witnesses saw the death itself, their accounts of separate incidents did not overlap in a way suggesting they copied each other's testimony, and no evidence showed their courtroom presence risked an unfair trial, the judge's decision not to sequester them was within his discretion.

• felony murder conviction
• domestic violence evidence
• other acts evidence
• witness sequestration
• Crime Victims' Bill of Rights