State v. Williams

Kenneth Howard Williams was convicted in Carroll County of aggravated sexual battery and child molestation for touching his four-year-old step-granddaughter's genitals with his finger on multiple occasions. At trial, the judge told the jury that a child under 16 cannot legally consent to any sexual act, and that the state did not need to separately prove the child did not consent. Williams did not object to this instruction at the time. After his conviction, the Court of Appeals of Georgia, relying on a Supreme Court of Georgia decision about a related crime called sexual battery, ruled that prosecutors must always prove a victim did not consent, even when the victim is a young child, and reversed Williams' aggravated sexual battery conviction because the instruction skipped that requirement. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed the instruction was legally wrong, but said that because Williams never objected at trial, the error had to be reviewed under a stricter test that asks whether it likely changed the jury's verdict. Given the child's age and the clearly sexual nature of the conduct, the court found no rational juror could have found consent, so the error was not serious enough to overturn the conviction.

The court held that lack of consent is a required element of aggravated sexual battery even when the victim is under 16, extending its earlier reasoning about sexual battery, but because Williams did not object at trial, the flawed jury instruction had to be reviewed only for plain error, and given the overwhelming evidence that a four-year-old could not have consented, the error did not affect the verdict.

The ruling clarifies that Georgia prosecutors must prove lack of consent even for very young victims in aggravated sexual battery cases, but it also shows that defendants who fail to object to a flawed instruction at trial face a tougher standard on appeal, making convictions in strong-evidence cases harder to overturn.

Reversed in part and remanded

1. The court explained that because the legal rulings Williams relied on came out after his trial but before his appeal finished, the Court of Appeals should not have automatically applied the newer rule (the 'pipeline rule') without first checking whether Williams had objected at trial.
2. Since Williams never objected to the jury instruction at trial, the court held that the claim could only be reviewed for plain error, a strict four-part test requiring an unwaived, clear legal mistake that probably changed the outcome and seriously harmed the fairness of the trial.
3. Applying its earlier decision in a sexual battery case (Watson v. State), the court reasoned that aggravated sexual battery's own wording also requires proof the victim did not consent, because the crime could technically cover non-sexual acts like a medical exam, so a blanket rule that young children can never consent does not fit this particular statute.
4. The court then found the instruction telling jurors a child under 16 cannot legally consent was therefore legally wrong and clear under current law, satisfying the first parts of the plain error test.
5. Turning to whether the error actually affected the verdict, the court concluded that given the victim's age of four, the clearly sexual nature of the repeated touching, and the strength of the evidence, no reasonable juror could have found the child capable of consenting, so the mistaken instruction did not likely change the jury's decision.
6. Because the error did not meet the plain error test's requirement of probably affecting the outcome, the court reversed the Court of Appeals only as to the aggravated sexual battery conviction and sent the case back.

• aggravated sexual battery
• child victim consent
• jury instruction error
• plain error review