Georgia Supreme Court rules on cases

ATLANTA — Following of summaries made Friday by the Georgia Supreme Court. Summaries are not prepared for every opinion released by the Court, but only for those cases considered of great public interest. Opinion summaries are not to be considered as official opinions of the Court. The full opinions are available on the Supreme Court website at www.gasupreme.us.

WILLIAMS V. DEKALB COUNTY ET AL.

The Supreme Court of Georgia has partially ruled in favor of a man who sued the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners for raising members’ salaries by 60 percent. In his lawsuit, Edward E. Williams claimed in part that the board violated the Georgia Open Meetings Act by not giving proper notice of its intent to pass the pay increase. The trial court dismissed that claim as well as others.

In the 7-1 decision, however, the majority found that “the trial court erred in dismissing Williams’ claim for civil penalties against the commissioners individually for violating the Open Meetings Act,” and it has reversed that portion of the trial court’s order. Williams, a DeKalb County taxpayer and citizen, alleged that on Jan. 18, 2018, the DeKalb Board of Commissioners sent a notice to the county’s “legal organ” and other newspapers that it would hold a “special called” legislative retreat workshop at 9 a.m. the next day. Although a proposed pay increase did not appear on the meeting agenda, the board discussed it at the meeting. The meeting minutes did not reflect the discussion.

The board later placed an ad in the legal organ notifying the public of the board’s intent to consider the salary increase at a Feb. 27, 2018 board meeting. The ad ran for three consecutive weeks on Feb. 8, 15, and 22. However, the pay increase did not appear on the board’s prepublished agenda for the Feb. 27 meeting. At the meeting, Williams and several other citizens publicly expressed concerns about the pay change before the board voted 7-0 to add the salary increase to the agenda as a “walk-on” item. The board then voted 6-1 to pass the increase, raising commissioners’ salaries from $40,530.55 to $65,000.

Williams asked the Georgia Attorney General and the DeKalb County Solicitor General to investigate and bring civil and criminal enforcement actions against DeKalb County, the Board of Commissioners, and Chief Executive Officer Michael Thurmond. (The trial court later dismissed the case against the CEO.) Both the Attorney General and the Solicitor General expressed concern about the board’s actions but declined to pursue punitive action against the county.

In August 2018, Williams sued the county and the others, claiming the board violated the Open Meetings Act, thus invalidating the increase and subjecting the board members to civil and criminal penalties. He also claimed that although the General Assembly had given county governing authorities the power to increase their pay through Georgia Code § 36-5-24, the Georgia Constitution and the DeKalb County Organizational Act prohibited them from having that power. Williams’ complaint asked for mandamus, declaratory, and injunctive relief, as well as civil and criminal penalties under the Open Meetings Act, and attorney fees and litigation costs.

In the majority opinion, written by Justice John J. Ellington, the high court has vacated the portion of the trial court’s order dismissing Williams’ claim for injunctive relief against Thurmond, and it has dismissed his claim for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief against the commissioners. But, “We reverse that portion of the court’s order dismissing Williams’ claim against the commissioners for civil penalties under the Open Meetings Act, and we remand the case to the trial court.”

In a discussion about Williams’ Open Meetings Act claims, the majority opinion addresses whether Williams had standing as a private person to seek to impose a civil penalty for noncompliance with the Act. “[W]e conclude that Williams had standing to request that a civil penalty be imposed against the commissioners under [Georgia Code] § 50-14-6 and to receive any penalty paid,” the opinion says.

Williams argued that despite acting collectively, the commissioners as individuals were subject to civil penalties under the Open Meetings Act for participating in a meeting in violation of the Act, and that neither official immunity nor legislative immunity applies to an official who violates the Act.

As to whether the commissioners were protected by official immunity, the court wrote “We conclude that Williams’ complaint sufficiently alleges that the commissioners acted with actual malice in intentionally violating the agenda requirements of the Act – a criminal act. Consequently, taking the allegations of Williams’ complaint as true for the purpose of reviewing the dismissal of the complaint, the commissioners are not entitled at this stage to official immunity from the penalty provisions of the Open Meetings Act. We also find no merit in the trial court’s determination that Williams’ claim is barred by legislative immunity.”

Therefore, “the trial court erred in dismissing Williams’ claim for civil penalties against the commissioners individually for violating the Open Meetings Act,” the majority concludes.

THE STATE V. GATES; GATES V. THE STATE

A man convicted more than 40 years ago of the rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman is entitled to a new trial under an opinion today by the Supreme Court.

With the opinion, written by Justice Charles J. Bethel, the high court has upheld a Muscogee County court’s grant of a new trial to Johnny Lee Gates. In February 1977, Gates, an African-American who was then 21 years old, was charged with the murder, rape and armed robbery of Katharina Wright, a white 19-year-old, in Columbus. Gates was found guilty on all counts in late summer, 1977 by an all-white jury and was sentenced to death. In October 1979, the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld his conviction and sentence. In 2003, Gates and the State agreed to remove the possibility of the death penalty following a mistrial on the question of intellectual disability, and he was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In 2015, Gates’s attorneys located several items in the office of the district attorney that had been introduced as evidence against him in his 1977 trial. Those items – a bathrobe belt and four neckties – had been used to tightly bind the victim. According to the findings of the trial court, the items were thought to have been destroyed at some point after Gates’s trial. Gates was granted the right to have the belt and one of the ties tested for DNA evidence, and the analysis of those results showed that, while DNA was present on the items, Gates’s DNA was not. On the basis of this evidence, and in light of the fact that the State’s case was premised on Gates having been barehanded when he committed the crimes, in January 2019, the Muscogee County Superior Court granted Gates a new trial.

In its 62 page-opinion, the Supreme Court of Georgia determined that the trial court properly applied the law on the granting of new trials to the newly discovered DNA evidence. The high court concludes that “although the State presented strong evidence of Gates’s guilt, Gates could have much more effectively countered such evidence had he also been able to present the newly discovered DNA evidence. In light of the weight given to such evidence by jurors, we cannot say that the trial court abused its discretion when it determined that the newly discovered evidence – the TrueAllele analysis of the DNA test results and the testimony supporting it – is so material that it would probably produce a different verdict.

“We therefore affirm the judgment of the trial court granting his motion on that basis,” the opinion states.

IN OTHER CASES, the Supreme Court of Georgia has upheld murder convictions and life prison sentences for:

— Rosano Wensley Bundel (Cobb Co.) BUNDEL V. THE STATE;

— Vivian Corley (Chatham Co.) CORLEY V. THE STATE; (The Supreme Court has upheld Corley’s murder conviction, but it has vacated his conviction for aggravated assault, which the trial court should have merged into the murder for sentencing purposes.)

— Demarquis Antonio Glenn (Decatur Co.) GLENN V. THE STATE;

— Charles Mattox (Evans Co.) MATTOX V. THE STATE;

— Eric Simmons (Lowndes Co.) SIMMONS V. THE STATE;

— Robert Earl Wilson Jr. (Telfair Co.) WILSON V. THE STATE.

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