Hilton was convicted of murder after shooting Allen and argued on appeal that the jury should have been instructed on voluntary manslaughter because he had told investigators that Allen had violated and threatened him. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed. It was skeptical that Hilton's vague post-shooting statements amounted even to slight evidence of the kind of sudden, violent passion required for voluntary manslaughter, but it did not need to resolve that point definitively. Instead, the Court held that any failure to give the instruction was harmless because the State's evidence strongly supported malice murder and the evidence of serious provocation was weak and nonspecific. In that posture, it was highly probable that the verdict would have been the same even with the lesser-offense charge.