Martin v. State

Rodriquis Martin pleaded guilty to malice murder and burglary in Douglas County in June 2018 and did not appeal at the time. More than seven years later, in November 2025, he filed his own motion asking a judge to let him file an appeal late, relying on a Georgia law that allows such requests but only within specific time windows. The trial court dismissed his motion, ruling it lacked authority (jurisdiction) to even consider it because Martin missed both deadlines set by the law: the general 100-day window after his normal appeal period expired, and a special later deadline that only applied to defendants who had already had an earlier out-of-time appeal request thrown out under a prior court decision. Martin did not qualify for either. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed the deadlines are strict jurisdictional limits and upheld the dismissal.

The court held that the time limits in Georgia's out-of-time appeal statute (OCGA § 5-6-39.1) are jurisdictional, meaning a trial court has no power to consider a late motion that misses them, and because Martin's motion satisfied neither the 100-day deadline nor the special deadline for prior dismissed motions, the trial court properly dismissed it for lack of jurisdiction.

The decision reinforces that Georgia defendants seeking to appeal old guilty pleas or convictions face hard, unforgiving deadlines under the out-of-time appeal statute. People who miss these windows, even by years, generally lose the ability to challenge their convictions through this route, regardless of the reason for the delay.

Affirmed

1. The court identified the controlling rule: Georgia's out-of-time appeal statute (OCGA § 5-6-39.1) sets specific deadlines for asking a court's permission to file a late appeal, and these deadlines determine whether the court even has authority (jurisdiction) to hear the request.
2. Under one deadline in that statute, a defendant must ask for permission within 100 days after the normal appeal period expired; the court found Martin's November 2025 motion, filed more than seven years after his 2018 guilty plea, missed this window by a wide margin.
3. Under a second, narrower deadline, defendants who previously had an out-of-time appeal motion dismissed under an earlier Georgia Supreme Court decision (Cook v. State) could still file until June 30, 2026; the court found nothing in the record showing Martin had ever filed such a prior motion, so this exception did not apply to him.
4. Because Martin's motion met neither statutory deadline, the court concluded the trial judge lacked jurisdiction to consider it at all, following the same reasoning the court had recently applied in a similar case (Merilien v. State), and therefore the dismissal was proper.
5. In a footnote, the court also noted that even a timely out-of-time appeal motion would not have helped Martin, because challenges to guilty pleas require a separate application for discretionary appeal within 30 days, a step the out-of-time appeal statute does not address or extend.

• out-of-time appeal
• guilty plea
• malice murder conviction
• jurisdictional deadlines
• Douglas County