Christina McDaniel was convicted of two counts of first-degree cruelty to children based on allegations that she tied her nephew in a garage and kept him there without temperature control. She challenged the sufficiency of the evidence, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, merger, and the trial court’s refusal to take judicial notice of weather data. The Court of Appeals of Georgia affirmed the convictions but vacated the sentences and remanded for resentencing. The court held that the evidence supported the verdicts and rejected McDaniel’s claims concerning hearsay, jury instructions, merger, and judicial notice. It explained that the requested weather information should have been presented as trial evidence and that McDaniel had not shown that judicial notice at the new-trial stage would have changed the result.