Keller v. State

Randall Guy Keller was convicted by a Muscogee County jury of felony murder, child cruelty, burglary, and drug charges after his ex-wife's two-year-old son, William Powell, died from severe head injuries. Evidence showed Keller was the only adult awake near the boy's room during the fatal injury, gave inconsistent accounts, searched online for how much pressure it takes to fracture a skull, and made incriminating statements from jail. On appeal to the Supreme Court of Georgia, Keller argued his trial lawyer was ineffective, that the trial court wrongly denied a continuance and a mistrial motion, made several bad evidentiary rulings, and that the trial judge was biased against him. The court rejected every claim, finding no deficient lawyering that changed the outcome, no abuse of discretion in the trial court's rulings, and that Keller never raised the bias claim at trial, so it could not be reviewed now. The court affirmed the conviction.

The court held that Keller failed to show his trial counsel's performance was both deficient and prejudicial under the Strickland standard, that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in its evidentiary and procedural rulings, and that Keller forfeited his judicial bias claim by not raising it until appeal.

The ruling reinforces that Georgia defendants must object to perceived judicial bias and preserve issues at trial, not save them for appeal, and confirms that jail phone calls and properly warranted cell phone searches remain fair game as evidence in serious criminal cases statewide.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the Strickland standard, which requires a defendant claiming ineffective assistance to show both that his lawyer's performance was unreasonable and that this failure likely changed the trial's outcome; Keller could not show either element for his various claims.
2. The court explained that a lawyer cannot be faulted for failing to file a meritless motion, and here a motion to suppress the recorded jail call or the cell phone search would have failed because inmates have no privacy expectation in recorded jail calls and the cell phone warrant was sufficiently specific.
3. On the continuance and discovery disputes, the court applied an abuse-of-discretion standard, meaning the trial judge's decision stands unless it fell outside the range of reasonable choices; because the case had been continued twice already and the defense had months to prepare, denying a further continuance and excluding a late-disclosed defense expert were within that range.
4. Regarding the argument-and-door-kicking evidence and the burglary charge, the court found these were 'intrinsic evidence' or a connected series of acts that completed the story of the crime for the jury, so admitting them and declining to sever the burglary count from the murder charges was not an abuse of discretion.
5. The court held that written text messages and internet search records are original documentary evidence, not testimonial statements read into the record, so the 'continuing witness' rule barring certain written testimony from going to the jury room did not apply.
6. Because Keller never objected to the judge's alleged bias or moved to recuse during trial, the court held that claim was forfeited, since Georgia law requires bias objections to be raised promptly rather than saved for appeal.

• felony murder conviction
• ineffective assistance of counsel
• child abuse death
• cell phone search warrant
• judicial bias claim