Sean Darin McDougal was convicted of rape and kidnapping with bodily harm in 1997 and his conviction was affirmed by the Court of Appeals. McDougal v. State , 239 Ga. App. 808 521 SE2d 458 1999. He filed a petition for the writ of habeas corpus and the habeas corpus court granted it on two grounds: lack of subject matter jurisdiction by the trial court because of an insufficient designation of a magistrate to preside over McDougal’s trial in superior court, and ineffective assistance of appellate counsel for refusing to raise both the subject matter jurisdiction issue and a jury charge issue which McDougal repeatedly requested appellate counsel to include in the appeal. Because we disagree with the habeas corpus court’s conclusion that the designation of the trial judge was ineffective and that the jury charge issue McDougal asked appellate counsel to assert would have resulted in reversal if raised on appeal, we reverse the judgment awarding McDougal a new trial. 1. The judge presiding at McDougal’s trial was a Gwinnett County magistrate who was designated to assist the Gwinnett County superior court. Relying primarily on Hicks v. State , 231 Ga. App. 552 449 SE2d 341 1998, the habeas corpus court concluded that the assignment of the magistrate to sit as a superior court judge was defective because it did not specify the scope of the assignment and did not specifically designate the particular case for which the magistrate was assigned. While the habeas corpus court’s reading of Hicks was accurate, the holding in Hicks is flawed. In that case, which involved a request for judicial assistance from a court in the same county, as does the present case, the Court of Appeals relied upon the provisions OCGA § 15-1-9.1 f, setting out what a designation of a judge to sit in another court must include. However, this Court had noted earlier that since a 1990 amendment of OCGA § 15-1-9.1 Ga. L. 1990, p. 497, § 1, subsection f “applies only when the request is for a judge outside the county . . . .” Cramer v. Spalding County , 261 Ga. 570, 573 fn. 3 409 SE2d 30 1991. Prior to that amendment, no distinction was drawn by the statute between intra-county and inter-county requests, and subsection c required all designation orders to contain those matters now required only of inter-county designating orders by the present subsection f. But subsequent to the amendment, the statute does not specify the content of an order for intra-county designation. Thus, the holding in Hicks , which was decided after the amendment, was erroneous and that decision must be overruled to the extent it holds that an intra-county designation order must comply with OCGA § 15-1-9.1 f.1
Since Hicks was decided wrongly, it does not support the habeas corpus court’s conclusion that the designation order was insufficient. The record in the present case contains a document which includes a request from the chief judge of the requesting court, which is presumed to be a valid request OCGA § 15-1-9.1 c. For an intra-county request for assistance, that is all the statute requires. That being so, the habeas corpus court’s conclusion that the trial court lacked subject matter jurisdiction, which conclusion was based solely on the erroneous conclusion that the designation was defective, was also error.
