Burns v. State

James Burns, an Atlanta police officer, shot and killed Deravis Rogers while on duty in June 2016. A grand jury first indicted him under the older version of Georgia's laws giving officers special notice and appearance rights before a grand jury. After the state dropped that indictment and sought a new one in 2018, prosecutors followed the newer 2016 version of those laws, which offers different notice and testimony procedures. Burns argued the state should have used the older law that was in effect when the shooting happened, and that using the new law violated his rights and the constitutional ban on retroactive laws. The trial court in Fulton County denied his motion to quash the indictment, reasoning the rights were substantive but did not vest. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed with that reasoning but reached the same result, holding that the laws are procedural rules about grand jury notice, not substantive rights, so the version in effect when the grand jury actually met governed.

The 2016 amendments to OCGA §§ 17-7-52 and 45-11-4 are procedural rules governing grand jury notice and appearance, not substantive rights, so the version in effect at the time of the grand jury proceeding applies regardless of when the alleged crime occurred, and applying them here was not an unconstitutional retroactive or ex post facto application.

The ruling clarifies that Georgia prosecutors must follow whatever version of the grand jury notice statutes is in effect at the time an officer's case actually goes before a grand jury, not the version in effect when the alleged crime occurred, affecting how police-involved shooting cases are charged statewide.

Affirmed

1. The court distinguished procedural law, which sets the methods for enforcing rights and duties, from substantive law, which creates or changes the underlying rights themselves, relying on prior Georgia cases treating notice, standing, and discovery statutes as procedural.
2. It found the 2016 amendments to the grand jury notice statutes (OCGA §§ 17-7-52 and 45-11-4) create no new obligations or rights that did not already exist, but only change how notice is given and how an accused officer may appear or testify before a grand jury, making them procedural.
3. Because the amended statutes were the ones in effect when Burns's actual 2018 grand jury proceedings took place, the court held those procedures governed, even though the underlying shooting happened in 2016 before the amendments took effect.
4. The court rejected reliance on the Court of Appeals' Lindsay decision, which had called similar rights 'substantive,' explaining that Lindsay misread an earlier Georgia Supreme Court case (Dudley) that never addressed the procedural-versus-substantive distinction, and overruled Lindsay on that point.
5. Because the statutes were procedural rather than substantive, the court concluded that applying the 2016 version to Burns's case did not amount to an unconstitutional retroactive law or an ex post facto violation, since those protections apply only to substantive rights.

• police officer indictment
• grand jury notice rights
• ex post facto claim
• statutory retroactivity
• Atlanta police shooting