Mario Hodges shot and killed Rudy Turner in Hodges’s home after Turner became agitated, threatened people who owed him money, and repeatedly brought weapons downstairs, including a large knife. Hodges claimed justification and sought to testify that, months earlier, a friend had told him Turner shot at the friend and her daughter. The trial court excluded that account because Hodges had no independent evidence that the alleged shooting occurred. The Court of Appeals reversed, treating the testimony as competent evidence of Hodges’s state of mind. The Supreme Court of Georgia reversed the Court of Appeals. It held that a defendant invoking justification must satisfy the safeguards governing evidence of a victim’s prior violence, including competent proof that the prior act occurred and a prima facie showing that the victim was the aggressor. A defendant could not evade those requirements by recasting unverified hearsay about the victim’s conduct as evidence of the defendant’s state of mind. The Court rejected the Court of Appeals’ contrary approach and remanded for consideration of Hodges’s remaining enumerations of error. Chief Justice Carley and Justice Melton specially concurred, reasoning that a narrow category of non-hearsay state-of-mind evidence might be admissible in an exceptional case, but that any error here was harmless because the jury heard substantial evidence of Turner’s violence. All justices concurred in the judgment.