Spinks v. State

The trial court properly admitted similar transaction evidence in the defendant's trial for burglary and criminal trespass, since the similarities of the defendant's involvement in other burglaries at gas station convenience stores established a sufficient connection between those burglaries and the one at issue.

Thank you for sharing!

Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

After a jury trial, Richard F. Spinks, an alias for a man whose real name is Robert Earl Lee,1 was convicted of burglary and criminal trespass, OCGA § 16-7-1 and 16-7-21, respectively. He appeals the trial court’s denial of his motion for a new trial contending in five enumerations of error that he received ineffective assistance of counsel and in an additional enumeration that the trial court erred in admitting similar transaction evidence. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.

Although Spinks does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence used to convict him, we recount it briefly for clarity. Construed most favorably to support the verdict, the evidence shows that on September 2, 2009, when the manager of a BP gas station in Marietta arrived at work, he noticed that slats on a louvered portion of his office door had been removed and damaged, and that his filing cabinet and drawers had been ransacked. The manager reviewed the store’s surveillance video and saw a man, later identified as Spinks, removing the slats from the door and entering restricted areas of the store, including a locked storeroom containing excess inventory and a computer. The video, which was played in color on a high definition 60-inch screen for the jury, showed Spinks wearing blue jeans and a black t-shirt with a large white circular design, as well as a black Coca-Cola ball cap. A police officer stopped Spinks about an hour later on an unrelated matter about two blocks from the BP station. The officer described Spinks as wearing or possessing the same clothing shown in the video, as did a police officer who later interviewed him at the station. Cameras that monitored the store’s outside area recorded images of a red GMC Jimmy vehicle in the parking area of the BP station, and when Spinks was stopped by police on the unrelated matter, he was driving a red GMC Jimmy. The officers who dealt with Spinks on the unrelated matter did not initially know about the BP burglary, but later connected Spinks to the BP burglary after viewing the surveillance video.

Spinks v. State

Share with Email

Thank you for sharing!

Trending Stories

More From ALM

Subscribe to Daily Report