Robert Allen Sears was convicted of felony murder, aggravated assault, and possessing a knife during a felony after Isaiah Lovett died from stab wounds during a boarding-house altercation. The Georgia Supreme Court rejected Sears’s challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence, a prospective juror’s qualifications, a detective’s reference to Sears’s invocation of rights, the felony-murder predicate, and several ineffective-assistance claims. The Court held that any comment on Sears’s silence was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt in light of the context and overwhelming evidence, including an eyewitness, Sears’s blood-stained clothing, a jailhouse confession, and the recovered knife. It also held that the jury could not have relied on burglary as a predicate because the trial court directed an acquittal on that count and removed it from consideration. But the aggravated-assault conviction could not stand separately. The indictment and jury charge did not identify two distinct assaults or a deliberate interval between nonfatal and fatal wounds, so the aggravated assault merged into felony murder. The Court vacated that conviction and sentence, remanded for resentencing, and affirmed the judgment in all other respects.