Stewart Pullin is currently under indictment and facing trial for multiple offenses, including alternative counts of malice and felony murder, in connection with the shooting death of his former wife. Pullin filed a motion in limine seeking to prohibit the prosecution from offering expert testimony based upon an analysis of cellular telephone records to establish the location from which Pullin made certain cellular calls at the time of the shooting. After a lengthy evidentiary hearing, the trial court determined that the scientific procedure in question may be verified with such certainty that it is competent evidence in a court of law. We granted interlocutory review and affirm.
At approximately 6:36 a.m. on December 4, 1998, Pullin’s ex-wife was shot and killed in a van in the garage of her home in Lithonia, Georgia. When the investigation focused on Pullin, officers questioned him concerning his whereabouts that morning. Pullin gave them a statement in which he claimed that he awoke in his home in Stockbridge, Georgia approximately 30 miles from Lithonia at 5:30 a.m.; that he telephoned his employer at about that time to report that he was ill and would not be in to work that day; and that he remained at home until 7:30 a.m. when he left to take his children to school. Pullin’s home telephone records reflected no such call to his employer. However, the police learned through cellular telephone records that Pullin had placed a call to his employer at 5:31 that morning on his cellular telephone from a cell site near Lithonia, a few miles of the victim’s home. The State seeks to introduce this evidence to refute Pullin’s custodial statement that he was at home in Stockbridge until 7:30 a.m. The State also wants to introduce two other calls made from Pullin’s cellular telephone which would tend to place him in the vicinity of the crime: a 7:09 a.m. call placed to Pullin’s own home which was serviced by the same cell site in Lithonia as the first call, and a second call to his home at 7:10 a.m. which was serviced by a cell site that is located between Lithonia and Pullin’s home in Stockbridge. Pullin challenges the admissibility of expert testimony pinpointing the location from which those cellular telephone calls were placed, an issue of first impression in this state.
