Brandon v. State

Eric Brandon admitted shooting and killing his stepson, Alexander Koser, firing several shots at close range. A Fulton County jury convicted him of malice murder and related crimes, and the trial judge sentenced him to life in prison plus five years for the firearm charge. On appeal, Brandon argued only that the trial judge was wrong to stop him from asking prospective jurors whether they believed anyone who had been arrested must be guilty of a crime. The problem was that Brandon's lawyer never objected when the judge made that ruling during jury selection. Georgia law has long required a lawyer to object at the time to preserve an issue for a normal appeal, and Brandon asked the court to abandon that rule, citing evidence and federal procedure rules that did not actually apply to jury-selection questions. The court declined to change the rule and found no exception letting it review the issue anyway, so it upheld the conviction.

A claim that a trial court improperly limited voir dire questioning is not preserved for ordinary appellate review unless the defendant lodged a contemporaneous objection, and such a claim does not fall within the limited categories of unpreserved errors reviewable for plain error.

The decision reinforces that Georgia defendants and their lawyers must object immediately to a judge's rulings, including limits placed on jury-selection questions, or lose the right to challenge them later on appeal, even in serious cases like this murder conviction.

Affirmed

1. Georgia has long required a contemporaneous objection, meaning the lawyer must object at the time of the ruling, to preserve a claim of error for a normal appeal; this rule applies even to a trial judge's own decision to limit voir dire (jury-selection) questions.
2. Brandon asked the court to relax or overrule that longstanding rule, pointing to provisions of the Evidence Code and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, but the court found those provisions did not govern voir dire questions at all, so they gave no basis for changing the rule.
3. The court considered whether Brandon's unpreserved claim could still be reviewed under plain error review, a narrow exception allowing appellate review of certain mistakes even without an objection.
4. Because Brandon's claim about the limited voir dire question did not fall within the four specific circumstances the court has recognized for plain error review, and the court declined to expand that review without direction from the General Assembly, the claim could not be reviewed at all.

• murder conviction
• jury selection
• contemporaneous objection rule
• plain error review
• Fulton County