State v. GATES (And Vice Versa)

Johnny Lee Gates was convicted in 1977 of murdering, raping, and robbing Katharina Wright and was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Columbus, Georgia. Decades of appeals followed, and in 2015 lawyers for Gates found a bathrobe belt and neckties from the crime scene that the State had previously said were destroyed. New DNA testing using advanced software called TrueAllele showed Gates was not a contributor to DNA on the items used to bind the victim's hands. Based on that evidence, a Muscogee County judge granted Gates an extraordinary motion for a new trial. The State appealed, arguing Gates waited too long to seek the testing and that the DNA evidence would not likely change the verdict, while Gates cross-appealed on a separate claim that jurors had been selected in a racially discriminatory way. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the grant of a new trial based on the DNA evidence, finding no abuse of discretion, and did not need to decide the jury discrimination issue.

The trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding that Gates satisfied all six requirements for an extraordinary new trial based on newly discovered evidence, because the TrueAllele DNA analysis excluding him from DNA on the binding items was not previously available, was diligently pursued once its existence was known, and was material enough that it would probably produce a different verdict.

The ruling means Gates, who has spent more than four decades in prison, will get a new trial. It also reinforces that Georgia courts can order new trials when advanced DNA software undermines evidence used to convict someone, and it highlights troubling historical practices around all-white juries in capital cases.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the six-part test from Timberlake v. State for extraordinary motions for new trial, which requires showing the evidence is newly discovered, was not missed due to lack of diligence, is material enough to probably change the verdict, is not merely cumulative or impeaching, and is supported by proper affidavits.
2. On diligence, the court found the record supported the trial court's conclusion that Gates and his lawyers reasonably relied on the State's 2002 representation that the belt and necktie had been destroyed in 1979, so they had no reason to seek DNA testing until interns discovered the items in 2015.
3. The court also found that advanced DNA software called TrueAllele, which uses probabilistic genotyping to interpret DNA mixtures that human analysts cannot read, did not exist in usable form until years after Gates' trial, so he could not have sought this specific analysis earlier than he did.
4. On materiality, the court weighed the new DNA results, which excluded Gates as a contributor to DNA on the items used to bind the victim's hands, against the trial evidence including his confessions, an eyewitness identification, and fingerprint evidence, and concluded the DNA evidence would likely have caused a reasonable juror to doubt his guilt.
5. Because the newly discovered DNA evidence undermined the core assumption that the person who bound the victim was also her killer, and because it would have weakened confidence in the confessions, eyewitness identification, and fingerprint evidence, the court held the trial judge acted within his discretion in granting a new trial.
6. Having affirmed the new trial on DNA grounds, the court found it unnecessary to reach the State's separate argument about destroyed evidence or Gates' cross-appeal claim of racial discrimination in jury selection, rendering that claim moot.

• Johnny Lee Gates
• new trial
• DNA evidence
• murder conviction
• jury discrimination