Harris v. Georgia
Annotate this CaseQuantavious Harris appealed his convictions for felony murder and other charges stemming from the 2009 shooting death of Stephen Anim. The trial court previously granted Harris’ motion for new trial on the ground that his trial counsel had provided ineffective assistance in failing to move to suppress certain text messages, but the Georgia Supreme Court reversed. Following remand for consideration of other issues raised in Harris’s motion for new trial, Harris raised additional, new grounds for his motion. The trial court addressed all of the issues presented and denied the motion. Harris appealed, raising a host of alleged errors by the court at trial. The Supreme Court determined none of these claims were properly within the scope of what the trial court was authorized to consider on remand, and thus the trial court should not have considered them. Accordingly, the ineffective assistance of counsel claims were waived. Additionally, Harris’s newly discovered evidence claim was not properly raised before the trial court and thus left the Supreme Court with nothing to review. But Harris’s claims of error by the trial court at trial were not required to have been raised in the motion for new trial in order for the Supreme Court to consider. Addressing those claims, the Court concluded: (1) the claim about the State’s closing argument was not preserved due to Harris’s failure to object at trial; (2) the trial court did not plainly err in instructing jurors about the use of their notes; (3) any abuse of discretion in admitting the text messages was harmless; and (4) the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting the similar-transaction evidence.
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