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Curryv.State

CourtSupreme Court of Georgia
Docket No.S12A0568
DecidedJuly 9, 2012
Reporter291 Ga. 446; 729 S.E.2d 370; 2012 Fulton County D. Rep. 2176; 2012 WL 2681371; 2012 Ga. LEXIS 672
JudgesSupreme Court of Georgia
Tags
CriminalCriminal LawCriminal ProcedureMurder & MayhemDue ProcessSufficiency of the EvidenceOther-Acts EvidenceMirandaMistrialJury InstructionsPlain ErrorTales From the Crypt
Case Summary

Michael Curry was convicted of murdering his wife, Ann, and their two young children in 1985. The evidence included the victims’ injuries, a bloodied axe in the home, an apparently staged burglary scene, Curry’s shifting accounts, an unexplained gap in his movements, and evidence bearing on his relationship with a coworker. A Muscogee County grand jury indicted him nearly 24 years later. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions. It held that the circumstantial evidence authorized the jury to reject reasonable hypotheses other than guilt and that Curry showed neither the kind of prejudice nor deliberate prosecutorial delay required for a due-process violation. The Court found no reversible error in the treatment of Curry’s post-Miranda failure to answer questions, the prosecutor’s closing argument, a spontaneous reference to a witness’s lie-detector test, or the exclusion of dissimilar crimes by another possible suspect. It also held that the trial court’s circumstantial-evidence recharge, including an illustration using the word “assume,” was not plainly erroneous when read as a whole. The felony-murder verdicts were vacated by operation of law, but the three consecutive malice-murder life sentences were affirmed. All Justices concurred.

Opinion

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