Andrew Wadlington appeals from his armed robbery conviction, contending he received ineffective assistance of counsel. Because the trial court erred by denying Wadlington’s motion for new trial based upon this claim, we must reverse. 1. Wadlington contends that his trial counsel erred by failing to object when a detective testified that he knew Wadlington was the person in a surveillance tape because the jury could look at Wadlington and the tape and draw their own conclusion. In Grimes v. State , 291 Ga. App. 585 662 SE2d 346 2008, we held that it “remains improper to allow a witness to testify as to the identity of a person in a video or photograph when such opinion evidence tends only to establish a fact which average jurors could decide thinking for themselves and drawing their own conclusions.” Id at 590 2.We therefore concluded that trial counsel’s performance was deficient when he failed to object to a detective’s testimony that “when I came into contact with the defendant, having already seen the FBI bulletin, it was apparent that this was the individual from those cases.” Id. at 590 2. Because the defendant’s defense at trial was misidentification and the other evidence of identification was “not strong,” we concluded that there was a reasonable probability that the outcome might have been different. Id. at 592-594.
The record before us here presents a similar situation. A convenience store employee testified that he was robbed at gunpoint in the early morning hours of September 12, 2006. While the employee got down on the floor as instructed by a man holding the gun, he saw a second man, a “big guy, another Afro-American; and he had a —he was all dressed in blue and he had a, like, a baseball cap on his head, too. And I just went down. . . .” The employee described the shirt as “light blue” in color and it was untucked. The hat was also blue. The employee could not see anything while was he was on the floor, but heard them “moving around looking for something.” Someone took his wallet out of his back pocket and then he heard the men leave. The entire robbery “was quick. It was two or three minutes.” The employee testified that he observed the man with the blue baseball cap “just for a moment,” meaning seconds. He described this man to the police as being six feet tall, 250 pounds, black with a dark complexion, and with no beard or mustache.
