Burns v. State

James Burns, an Atlanta police officer, was indicted in Fulton County after fatally shooting Deravis Rogers while on duty in June 2016. His first indictment was later dropped and the state sought to re-indict him in 2018, using notice procedures that had been updated by the legislature effective July 1, 2016, after the shooting but before the second grand jury met. Burns argued the state should have used the older rules in effect when the shooting happened, which gave officers slightly different rights to appear and testify before the grand jury. The trial court rejected his motion, reasoning the older rules created only public rights that did not have to be honored. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed with that reasoning but reached the same result a different way: it held that the notice and testimony rules for officers facing grand juries are procedural, not substantive, rights. Because the updated rules were in effect when the actual grand jury proceeding took place in 2018, they governed, regardless of when the shooting occurred. The court affirmed the trial court's denial of Burns's motion.

The 2016 amendments to the officer grand jury notice statutes are procedural rules governing how grand jury proceedings are conducted, not substantive rights tied to the date of the alleged crime, so the version of the law in effect when the grand jury actually convened in 2018 applied to Burns's case.

The ruling clarifies that when the legislature changes how police officers are notified of or can participate in grand jury proceedings, prosecutors should follow the rules in effect when the grand jury actually meets, not the rules from when the alleged crime occurred. This affects how Georgia district attorneys handle cases against officers and other public officials going forward.

Affirmed

1. The court explained that procedural law is law that prescribes the methods for enforcing rights and duties, while substantive law creates the underlying rights themselves, and Georgia precedent treats notice and participation rules for court proceedings as procedural.
2. Applying that distinction, the court found the 2016 changes only altered how and when an accused officer receives notice of a grand jury hearing and how he may appear or testify there, without creating any new right that did not already exist.
3. Because the changes were procedural, the relevant question for retroactivity was not when the alleged crime occurred but when the grand jury proceeding itself took place; since that proceeding happened in September 2018, after the amendments took effect, the amended rules controlled.
4. The court rejected reliance on an earlier Court of Appeals case, State v. Lindsay, which had called similar rights substantive, finding that decision was based on a misreading of prior Supreme Court precedent and formally overruling it.
5. The court also rejected the officer's ex post facto argument, noting that the constitutional prohibition on retroactive punishment applies only to substantive rights, not procedural ones like the grand jury notice rules at issue here.
6. Although the trial court reached the correct outcome, the Supreme Court of Georgia found its underlying reasoning wrong because it mistakenly treated the statutes as substantive and analyzed whether the rights were public or private, a distinction that only matters for substantive laws.

• police officer indictment
• grand jury notice rights
• Atlanta police shooting
• ex post facto
• procedural vs substantive law