Sears v. State

The trial court's failure to charge separately on accident was harmless, given the charge as a whole, which properly and fully instructed the jury on the state's burden of proving that the defendant acted with the requisite malicious intent to commit each of the charged crimes.

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Tory Sears was convicted of felony murder in connection with the death of a 16-month-old girl. On appeal, he argues that the evidence was insufficient to show he acted with the requisite mens rea and that the trial court erred by declining to instruct the jury on his proposed accident defense. We affirm. 1. The evidence presented at trial, viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, showed the following.1 Sears and Ebonique Ricks lived together in Clayton County with Ricks’s 10-year-old son Keiyon and her 16-month-old twin girls Jakyila, the victim, and Jakayla. The girls were fine when Ricks left them with Sears and went to work on September 30, 2007. He took them to a cookout, where the victim was awake and attentive. However, she later threw up after eating, and so Sears took the children home.

He put the twins down for a nap, and when the victim awoke, she was whining. As he headed outside to play, Keiyon heard Sears angrily yell at the victim, “shut up girl” —no surprise to Keiyon, since he had seen Sears yell at, hit, and toss the twin girls before. Some time later, Sears called Ricks at work; he had not yet called 911. He told her that when they came home from the cookout, he put the victim down in the playpen and went to another room to get medicine for her, and when he returned, the victim was unresponsive. He claimed that he grabbed the child and shook her in a failed attempt to resuscitate her. He later told the victim’s grandmother that the victim’s “eyes were rolling around in her head” and that he poured water on her, hit her, and shook her to try to wake her up.

Sears v. State

The trial court's failure to charge separately on accident was harmless, given the charge as a whole, which properly and fully instructed the jury on the state's burden of proving that the defendant acted with the requisite malicious intent to commit each of the charged crimes.

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