The Atlanta Gleaner.

Ballinger v. Watkins, 2022 WL 17813597, December 20, 2022
#juror misconduct #trial practice #criminal law
During Joseph Watkins's murder trial, a juror conducted a “drive test” during a break in deliberations to see whether the defendant could have been physically present at the time and place the victim was shot. The next day, the jury voted to convict Watkins of felony murder and other crimes, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Years later, Watkins's counsel learned about the juror's misconduct and filed the habeas petition in this case. Habeas relief was granted. Supreme Court of Georgia AFFIRMS.

On January 11, 2000, Isaac Dawkins was shot once in the head as he was driving his white pickup truck north on Highway 27 from Floyd College, south of Rome, Georgia. He died the next day. The physical evidence of the crime was limited: a lead bullet core recovered from Dawkins's body during the autopsy, a 9mm cartridge case found near the crime scene, and a bullet fragment found inside Dawkins's car that had markings consistent with having been fired from a 9mm firearm. No firearm was found.

At the same time of the shooting, Wayne Benson was also driving north on Highway 27. He noticed a small blue car driving erratically and interacting with a white pickup truck about a half mile north of Floyd College. After losing sight of the vehicles “[f]or a few minutes” and traveling about a mile to a mile-and-a-half down the road, Benson saw a “flash of some kind” before the white truck drove across the median, into southbound traffic, and then onto the far shoulder. Benson pulled over and called 911 to report the accident, and emergency services were dispatched at 7:19 p.m. No one else witnessed the incident or reported a vehicle interacting with the white truck.

During that same time, defendant Watkins was at home in northeast Floyd County, getting ready to drive to see his girlfriend, who lived 45 minutes south in Cedartown. While getting into his truck, Watkins called his girlfriend at 7:15 p.m. The call lasted for 4 minutes and 23 seconds and originated in an area covered by the Kingston cell tower—the only cell tower that covered Watkins's house. Watkins's girlfriend testified that he arrived in his white pickup truck at her house—south of the crime scene—around 8:00 p.m.

Juror Rogena Cordle later testified at the habeas hearing that she had been confused by the cell-phone evidence presented at trial. So, after the first day of deliberations on Saturday, despite the trial court's explicit instructions to not “go measuring distances or stopping by the scene and investigating on your own, she decided to do a drive test to see whether Watkins could have arrived at the scene of the crime around the time Dawkins was shot—7:18 or 7:19 p.m. based on the time of the emergency-services dispatch from Benson's 911 call—after making the phone call to his girlfriend from the Kingston tower's coverage area at 7:15 p.m.

The next day, a Sunday, Cordle used her car clock to time how long it took her to drive northbound on Highway 27 from the area of the crime to the intersection of Chulio Road and Highway 411. She drove the route backwards from end point to start point, her car clock did not indicate seconds, and she did not account for the time that it would have taken for Watkins to turn around from traveling south through the edge of the (supposed) Kingston cell-tower coverage area to head back north in the direction of the crime. Nor did she account for the testimony that the shooter had been seen traveling from the south in tandem with Dawkins for “a few minutes” and at least a mile before the shooting. And she did not know exactly where the crime had occurred or where the Kingston cell tower's coverage ended. Nonetheless, based on her drive test, she determined that Watkins could have been where Dawkins was shot at the relevant time.

On Monday morning, the day after Cordle's drive test, the jury voted to convict Watkins. In April 2022, the habeas court granted Watkin’s petition, terminating their analysis after finding juror misconduct.