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In the Supreme Court of Georgia

No. S26A0787

Chauncey Daniels

v.

The State

On Appeal from the Superior Court of Fulton County

No. 17SC153109

Decided: October 14, 2026

WARREN, Presiding Justice.

Chauncey Daniels was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in connection with an April 2017 shooting on a MARTA train that left Zachariah Hunnicutt dead and several others wounded. On appeal, Daniels contends that the trial court committed plain error when it declined to charge the jury on vol- untary manslaughter and that his trial counsel rendered consti- tutionally ineffective assistance in two ways: by failing to object to the trial court’s refusal to give a voluntary manslaughter charge and by failing to stipulate to his status as a convicted felon. For the reasons explained below, we affirm. 1

1 The shooting occurred on April 13, 2017. In July 2017, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Daniels for malice murder, felony murder predi- cated on armed robbery, felony murder predicated on aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, two counts of felony murder predicated on possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, armed robbery, four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (as to victims Hunnicutt, Angel Bowens, Ernest Butler,

1. The evidence presented at trial showed the following. Daniels, Hunnicutt, and Hunnicutt’s girlfriend, Johnesia Cofield, worked at the same company. Daniels’s then live-in girlfriend, Bianca Ragland, testified as follows. Hunnicutt “stayed with” her and Daniels for “a couple of weeks” around November 2016. The day after Hunnicutt moved out, Daniels told Ragland that Hun- nicutt had stolen several of their belongings, including “[their] money, [] rent money, … clothes, shoes,” and “drugs,” and Daniels was “pretty mad about it.” Daniels told Ragland that when Dan- iels asked Hunnicutt about the stolen belongings, “[Hunnicutt] just acted like he didn’t see [Daniels] or hear [him].”

Two weeks later, Ragland and Daniels saw Hunnicutt at the mall. Ragland tried to ask Hunnicutt about the stolen belong- ings, but Hunnicutt ignored her and acted “like he didn’t know [them].” After this encounter, Daniels was “mad and pissed off” but remarked that he did not “want to hurt [Hunnicutt].”

Cofield’s testimony indicated that around five months later, on April 13, 2017, on the way home from running errands,

and Johnesia Cofield), possession of a firearm during the commission of a fel- ony, and two counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. At the conclusion of a jury trial lasting from October 11 to October 15, 2018, the jury found Daniels guilty of all counts. The trial court sentenced Daniels to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole for malice murder; life in prison for armed robbery; 20 consecutive years in prison for each of the aggravated assaults of Bowens, Butler, and Cofield; and 15 consecutive years in prison for one count of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, for a total sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole plus 75 years. The remaining counts were merged or vacated by operation of law. On October 24, 2018, Dan- iels timely filed a motion for new trial, which he amended with new counsel on September 28, 2020. After several substitutions of counsel and a hearing, the trial court denied Daniels’s motion on November 1, 2024. He timely appealed, and his case was docketed to this Court’s April 2026 term and submitted for a decision on the briefs.

Hunnicutt and Cofield ran into a family friend of Cofield’s, Sha- ronda Hunter, at a MARTA station, and the three boarded an eastbound train together.

Surveillance footage from the train car showed the follow- ing. Around two minutes after Hunnicutt, Cofield, and Hunter boarded the train and sat down near the middle of the train car, a man wearing a blue and white striped shirt, dark pants, and a black and white baseball cap boarded the train and sat several rows behind Hunnicutt, Cofield, and Hunter. The man switched seats several times and ultimately chose a seat facing away from Hunnicutt, Cofield, and Hunter. After the train left the station, the man in the striped shirt got out of his seat and walked towards Hunnicutt while pulling a gun out of his waistband. Hunter tes- tified that it was at this moment that the man in the striped shirt said, “Oh he think this shh [sic] is a game,” and began shooting at Hunnicutt. Surveillance video showed that Hunnicutt, Cofield, and others, including passengers Angel Bowens and Ernest But- ler, ran towards the back of the train car in an attempt to escape. The shooter continued pursuing Hunnicutt and discharged his gun several times at him, even after Hunnicutt fell to the floor at the back of the train car.

Surveillance footage showed that after he finished shoot- ing, the shooter walked to the other end of the train car and stopped briefly to grab Hunnicutt’s backpack. He then walked through the next train car and stood between the cars until the train arrived at the next station. When the train stopped, the shooter exited the train and ran up the station’s “down” escalator. He attempted to escape through the emergency gate at the station but was intercepted by a MARTA police officer.

Hunnicutt had been shot six times and died at the scene. Three other passengers suffered gunshot wounds but survived:

Cofield in her left knee; Bowens in her right hip; and Butler in his right leg.

At trial, four passengers who had been on the train on the day of the shooting—including Hunter, Cofield, and Bowens— identified Daniels as the shooter.

The MARTA police officer who apprehended Daniels testi- fied that, after apprehending him, he noticed that Daniels had a gun. The gun was later determined to be a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol. A firearms examiner conclusively linked all the casings and one of the bullets recovered from the train car to the same gun that Daniels possessed at the time of his arrest. 2

At trial, Daniels pursued a misidentification defense, not- ing certain discrepancies in witness accounts of the shooter’s clothing and emphasizing that there was another man wearing a striped shirt on the train car where the shooting occurred. Before the close of evidence, Daniels’s counsel submitted a written re- quest to instruct the jury on voluntary manslaughter. To support that request, Daniels’s counsel argued that Ragland’s testimony regarding “prior difficulties” between Daniels and Hunnicutt “may have provided [a] basis by which the jury could find that the alleged shooter acted out of sudden irresistible passion.” The trial court denied the request. Daniels’s counsel did not object to the trial court’s denial nor the jury instructions subsequently given. The jury found Daniels guilty of all counts.

2 Because the remaining bullets recovered from the scene were dam- aged, they could not be conclusively linked to the same gun in Daniels’s pos- session. The firearms examiner was able to conclude, however, that all but one of the damaged bullets were at least “consistent with being [shot] from a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol.”

2. Daniels claims that the trial court erred by denying Dan- iels’s request to charge the jury on voluntary manslaughter. Be- cause Daniels failed to show that a voluntary manslaughter jury instruction likely would have affected the outcome of the trial pro- ceedings, this claim fails.

Because Daniels did not object to the trial court’s jury in- structions as given, we review this claim for plain error only. See Jivens v. State, 317 Ga. 859, 861 (2023) (“A party’s failure to object to the instruction as given, or to the omission of an instruction, precludes appellate review of the instruction ‘unless such portion of the jury charge constitutes plain error which affects substantial rights of the parties.’” (quoting OCGA § 17-8-58(b)) (citation omit- ted)). To prevail on this claim, Daniels must establish that the alleged instructional error was not “affirmatively waived by him”; was “clear or obvious”; affected his “substantial rights, which in the ordinary case means he must demonstrate that it affected the outcome of the trial court proceedings”; and “seriously affected the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings.” See Browne v. State, ___ Ga. ___ (2026), S26A0717, slip op. at 7 (Ga. Aug. 13, 2026) (2026 WL 2348482 at *3) (punctuation and citation omitted). If one prong of the plain error test is not satis- fied, we need not address the other prongs. Id.

OCGA § 16-5-2(a) provides:

A person commits the offense of voluntary man- slaughter when he causes the death of another hu- man being under circumstances which would other- wise be murder and if he acts solely as the result of a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient to excite such passion in a reasonable person; however, if there should have been an interval between the provoca- tion and the killing sufficient for the voice of reason and humanity to be heard, of which the jury in all cases shall be the judge, the killing shall be at- tributed to deliberate revenge and be punished as murder.

When requested, the trial court must give a voluntary man- slaughter instruction “if there is slight evidence to support it.” Hilton v. State, 322 Ga. 166, 167 (2025) (citation omitted).

Daniels contends that he was entitled to a voluntary man- slaughter instruction. He reasons that evidence of provocation was introduced through Ragland’s testimony, which he character- izes on appeal as evidence of a “continuing heated argument” from a “theft dispute” that occurred several months prior to the shoot- ing. Even assuming (without deciding) that a dispute about an alleged theft that occurred five months before a shooting could constitute “slight evidence” of serious provocation sufficient to warrant a voluntary manslaughter jury instruction, we conclude that any error in declining to give the requested instruction did not affect Daniels’s substantial rights. That is because the evi- dence supporting Daniels’s malice murder conviction was strong: surveillance video and eyewitness testimony presented to the jury showed that the shooter boarded the train with a firearm after Hunnicutt boarded; lay in wait; ambushed Hunnicutt; and con- tinued pursuing Hunnicutt as he tried to flee. From this evidence the jury also could have inferred that Daniels in fact waited until the train departed the station to ambush Hunnicutt so that Hun- nicutt could not escape the attack. Additionally, none of the eye- witnesses who identified Daniels as the shooter at trial (Cofield, Bowens, Hunter, and a fourth eyewitness) testified that Hun- nicutt spoke to or interacted with Daniels on the train car prior to the shooting, from which the jury could have inferred that Dan- iels was not provoked on the train that day. By contrast, the only evidence Daniels presented that he was provoked in a way that could support a voluntary manslaughter instruction was testi- mony from Ragland that Daniels was “mad and pissed off” when Hunnicutt stole from Daniels five months before the shooting, and Hunter’s testimony that Daniels stated, “Oh he think this shh [sic] is a game,” as he shot Hunnicutt. And Daniels presented no evidence that he shot Hunnicutt “solely as the result of” the theft. See OCGA § 16-5-2(a).

Given all of this, Daniels has not demonstrated that the failure to instruct the jury on voluntary manslaughter likely af- fected the outcome of the trial court proceedings, see Browne, ___ Ga. at ___, S26A0717, slip op. at 11 (Ga. Aug. 13, 2026) (2026 WL 2348482 at *6). That is especially so because the jury was likely to determine that five months was long enough for Daniels’s “voice of reason and humanity to be heard.” See OCGA § 16-5- 2(a). Accordingly, any error in failing to instruct the jury on vol- untary manslaughter did not affect Daniels’s substantial rights, and he has failed to show plain error. See Burke v. State, 302 Ga. 786, 791 (2018). 3

3 Citing Jones v. State, 314 Ga. 466 (2022), the State contends that this Court should hold that a voluntary manslaughter instruction was not war- ranted here—notwithstanding the evidence Daniels presented at trial—be- cause the time between Daniels’s alleged provocation and the crime was, as a matter of law, long enough “for the voice of reason and humanity to be heard.” See Jones, 314 Ga. at 470 (authorizing the trial court to find “as a matter of law that [a] month-long interval … was a sufficient cooling-off period such that the earlier confrontation did not constitute even slight evidence of provocation” (quotation marks and citation omitted)).

3. Daniels also contends that his trial counsel provided con- stitutionally ineffective assistance in two ways: by failing to object to the trial court’s refusal to give a jury instruction for voluntary manslaughter, and by failing to stipulate to Daniels’s status as a convicted felon.

To prevail on these claims, Daniels must prove both that his counsel’s performance was deficient and that this deficient performance resulted in prejudice. See Strickland v. Washington, 466 US 668, 687 (1984). To show deficient performance, Daniels “must overcome the strong presumption that his counsel’s con- duct falls within the broad range of reasonable professional con- duct and show that his counsel performed in an objectively unrea- sonable way in the light of all of the circumstances.” Merritt v. State, 310 Ga. 433, 435 (2020) (cleaned up). “[D]ecisions regard- ing trial tactics and strategy may form the basis for an ineffec- tiveness claim only if they were so patently unreasonable that no competent attorney would have followed such a course.” Ander- son v. State, 319 Ga. 56, 63 (2024) (citation omitted). To establish

We note an apparent tension between our case law holding that an in- terval of time may, as a matter of law, authorize a trial court to decline giving a voluntary manslaughter instruction requested by the defendant, and the text of OCGA § 16-5-2(a), which provides that “if there should have been an interval between the provocation and the killing sufficient for the voice of reason and humanity to be heard, of which the jury in all cases shall be the judge, the killing shall be attributed to deliberate revenge and be punished as murder” (emphasis added). Compare Jones, 314 Ga. at 470, and Harris v. State, 280 Ga. 372, 373–74 (2006), with OCGA § 16-5-2(a). We need not resolve that ten- sion today, however, because Daniels has failed to show that the omission of the voluntary manslaughter instruction affected his substantial rights in this case. See Annunziata v. State, 317 Ga. 175, 178 (2023) (“[W]e need not analyze all of the elements of the plain-error test when, as in this case, Appellant has failed to establish one of them.”).

prejudice, Daniels “must show that there is a reasonable proba- bility that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.” Strickland, 466 US at 694. If either prong of the Strickland test is not met, we need not address the other. See Anderson, 319 Ga. at 63.

(a) Daniels claims that his trial counsel provided ineffec- tive assistance by not objecting to the trial court’s failure to give a voluntary manslaughter instruction. This claim fails because Daniels has not shown that trial counsel’s failure to object was deficient performance.

At the motion for a new trial hearing, trial counsel testified that even though Daniels’s “primary argument” was an “identity defense” and the “goal [was] always to try to get an acquittal,” there were also plans to incorporate an “alternate defense” of vol- untary manslaughter into closing argument. However, counsel made no mention of voluntary manslaughter, provocation, or sud- den passion in closing argument.

The question of whether counsel’s actions were patently unreasonable is an objective one. See Jackson v. State, 318 Ga. 393, 397 (2024). “[I]t is rarely an unreasonable strategy to not pursue defenses that logically conflict,” like the misidentification and voluntary manslaughter defenses here. See Gaston v. State, 307 Ga. 634, 637 (2020) (citation omitted). “[A]lthough a defend- ant may choose to pursue alternative defense theories, doing so may risk alienating the jury, particularly where there is only slight evidence to support a theory.” Id. As noted above, the pri- mary evidence Daniels cited to support a request for a voluntary manslaughter instruction was testimony regarding a dispute be- tween Daniels and Hunnicutt about an alleged theft that occurred five months before the shooting. Given the lack of evidence sup- porting a voluntary manslaughter theory, it was not objectively unreasonable for trial counsel to abandon the weaker voluntary manslaughter theory and focus solely on Daniels’s misidentifica- tion defense. Accordingly, trial counsel was not deficient in de- clining to object to the trial court’s instruction that did not include a voluntary manslaughter instruction. See Bodie v. State, 323 Ga. 891, 894 (2026) (holding that it was “not objectively unreasona- ble” to “focus on arguing” a self-defense theory and “forgo” re- questing a conflicting accident instruction in light of stronger ev- idence of self-defense presented at trial). Thus, this claim of inef- fective assistance fails.

(b) Daniels claims that his trial counsel provided ineffec- tive assistance by failing to stipulate to Daniels’s status as a con- victed felon. It is a “fundamental rule” that claims for ineffective assistance of trial counsel must be raised at the “earliest practi- cable moment.” See Elkins v. State, 306 Ga. 351, 361 (2019) (ci- tation omitted). The “earliest practicable moment” for Daniels to have raised this claim of ineffective assistance of counsel was in his motion for new trial because he was represented by new coun- sel at that time. See Henderson v. State, 322 Ga. 304, 314–15 (2025). Because Daniels did not raise this claim in his amended motion for new trial or at the motion for new trial hearing, his claim is waived. See id.

Judgment affirmed. All the Justices concur, except LaGrua, J., who concurs in judgment only in Division 2.