After being involved in a motor vehicle collision that resulted in the death of James Oliver, Danielle Taylor was indicted for, among other things, involuntary manslaughter, first degree homicide by vehicle, and serious injury by vehicle.1 A jury acquitted Taylor on the homicide by vehicle count, acquitted her on a charge of following too closely, and found her guilty on all remaining counts. Despite the jury’s acquittal of Taylor on the homicide by vehicle charge, however, the trial court then decided after the verdict to treat the involuntary manslaughter charge against Taylor as a second count of first degree vehicular homicide, and thereafter sentenced Taylor to fifteen years for first degree homicide by vehicle. The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s entry of a conviction for first degree homicide by vehicle and remanded the case to the trial court for re-sentencing on the charge of serious injury by vehicle. This Court granted Taylor’s petition for a writ of certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals erred in directing the trial court to re-sentence Taylor for the offense of serious injury by vehicle where the trial jury acquitted Taylor of homicide by vehicle, but also found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter based on the same set of facts involving a single victim. As explained more fully below, because the record reveals that the involuntary manslaughter count of the indictment was not merely a second count of first degree homicide by vehicle, we agree with the Court of Appeals that the trial court improperly treated the jury’s finding of guilt on the involuntary manslaughter count as a finding of guilt on an additional homicide by vehicle count. We therefore affirm. Here, the trial court inappropriately engaged in after-the-fact speculation in an effort to make sense of the jury verdict. Again, the jury acquitted Taylor of vehicular homicide, but found Taylor guilty of involuntary manslaughter. The difficulty arose from the fact that the conviction for involuntary manslaughter was for an offense that should never have been charged. The proper charge, under these circumstances, would have been for vehicular homicide only, the charge for which Taylor was acquitted. See State v. Foster , 141 Ga. App. 258, 260 1 233 SE2d 215 1977, aff’d , 239 Ga. 302 236 SE2d 644 “As a result of the enactment . . . of the vehicular homicide statute . . . vehicular homicides which formerly were prosecuted as for involuntary manslaughter must now be prosecuted under the new statute”.
The State would attempt to justify the trial court’s ruling by concluding that the trial court was allowed to treat the indicted involuntary manslaughter charge as a de facto charge of homicide by vehicle resulting from reckless driving —even after the jury had expressly acquitted Taylor of vehicular homicide. However, there are several problems with this conclusion: 1 it is clear that all charges were indicted, tried, and charged as distinct and separate offenses; 2 by re-casting the impermissible involuntary manslaughter charge as an ostensibly proper vehicular homicide charge, the trial court allowed and gave life to an inappropriate prosecution for both involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide; and 3 by re-casting the involuntary manslaughter charge as a second charge for vehicular homicide after the verdict , the trial court usurped the role of the jury.
