Shine v. State

In 2006, I'Kenyo Shine pleaded guilty to felony murder in Bibb County and received a life sentence without appealing. Over nearly two decades he filed repeated challenges, including a 2008 habeas petition that a habeas court rejected on the merits, finding his lawyer was not deficient because Georgia law at the time gave defendants no automatic right to appeal a guilty plea. After the Supreme Court of Georgia later changed that rule and then eliminated a different court's out-of-time appeal process, the legislature passed a new law letting some defendants file for a fresh out-of-time appeal. Shine tried again in 2025, but the trial judge denied his request, saying the same claim had already been litigated and lost. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Georgia agreed. It held that the earlier habeas ruling barred Shine from relitigating the same ineffective-assistance claim, that the claim also failed on its own terms because no right to appeal existed when Shine pleaded guilty in 2006, and that his complaint about the judge's earlier recusal came too late because he never objected below.

The court held that a prior habeas ruling denying the same ineffective-assistance claim bars relitigation under res judicata, and that because no unqualified right to appeal from a guilty plea existed in 2006, counsel could not have been deficient for failing to advise Shine of a nonexistent right, so the trial court properly denied his 2025 motion for out-of-time appeal.

The ruling clarifies how Georgia's 2025 out-of-time-appeal statute interacts with prior habeas rulings, showing that defendants who already lost the same claim in a habeas proceeding cannot use the new law to try again, which limits reopening old guilty-plea convictions statewide.

Affirmed

1. The court explained that under res judicata, a legal doctrine barring relitigation of claims already decided, a habeas court's earlier rejection of Shine's ineffective-assistance claim in 2009 prevented him from raising the identical claim again through a motion for out-of-time appeal.
2. The court found that in 2006, when Shine pleaded guilty, Georgia law gave defendants only a limited right to appeal a guilty plea, resolvable only from facts already in the record, so his lawyer could not have been ineffective for failing to advise him of a broader appeal right that did not yet exist.
3. The court noted that Shine relied on Collier v. State, a 2019 decision that later removed the requirement to show a meritorious appeal issue, but found that ruling did not retroactively give him a right to appeal that did not exist when he pleaded guilty in 2006.
4. The court held that Shine failed to meet his burden as the appealing party because he did not include the 2006 plea transcript or related documents in the record, making it impossible to show any appealable issue existed in the record at that time.
5. The court concluded that Shine's objection to Judge Simms presiding over the 2025 motion, based on an earlier recusal, was raised too late because Shine never sought recusal or objected when the same judge ruled on his earlier 2019 motion, so the issue was not preserved for appeal.

• out-of-time appeal
• guilty plea
• ineffective assistance of counsel
• res judicata
• judicial recusal