Lawson v. State

The defendants failed to show that their respective attorneys were deficient in not objecting to the introduction of investigative summaries attached to the medical examiner's reports on the victims, which omitted the second of three pages.

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Herman Lawson and Christopher James were jointly indicted, along with two others, for charges arising out of the shooting deaths of two victims. In separate trials, appellants were convicted of all charges, including the malice murder of both victims. At the first appearance of these cases before this Court, we reversed the trial court’s grant of new trial to each appellant. State v. James, 292 Ga. 440 738 SE2d 601 2013. Upon remand, each appellant’s sentence was reinstated, the remaining grounds for new trial raised in each appellant’s motion for new trial were considered, and the trial court denied those motions. Lawson’s and James’s appeals were consolidated for review by this Court. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm the convictions as to each appellant.1

Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence in both trials showed the deaths arose out of a dispute over whether drugs had been stolen from co-indictee Bruce Roberts’s apartment where the victims, Jeremiah Ingram and Fatima Fisher, were found by the co-indictees when they returned to Roberts’s apartment after spending the evening at a night club. The co-indictees blamed the victims for stealing cocaine and then bound the victims and transported them in two different vehicles to a location in Fulton County where Lawson shot them at James’s urging. The bodies were left near the side of the road. After the shooting, the co-indictees changed the tires on one of the vehicles and drove the other vehicle to a rural area in another county and set fire to it, as part of an attempted cover-up of the crimes.

Lawson v. State

The defendants failed to show that their respective attorneys were deficient in not objecting to the introduction of investigative summaries attached to the medical examiner's reports on the victims, which omitted the second of three pages.

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