Court Opinion

ID: 9845668
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:26:03.746505+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:17.965973
License: Public Domain

Beasley, Judge,
concurring specially.
I concur fully but wish to point out that the offenses disclosed on the fingerprint card were known to the jury. The documents evidencing defendant’s indictment, conviction and sentences for these offenses were admitted as evidence that he was a recidivist (OCGA § 17-10-7). This indictment and four others on which defendant had been convicted and sentenced were admitted. As to all of these documents, but not as to the fingerprint card, the court instructed the jury to limit their consideration only to the recidivist count and not to consider them as substantive evidence of guilt or innocence as to the other counts.
This points up the problem of trying a recidivist count along with a new crime instead of bifurcating the two. Allowing the jury to determine guilt or innocence as to the new crime, without any knowledge of past crimes and, after verdict on it, trying the recidivist count, eliminates the necessity for the jurors to mentally erase the knowledge for part of their deliberations. The charge to compartmentalize information does not assure success even with conscious effort.
So here we have the jury, knowing about four convictions and some of the details of each, but by law ignoring this knowledge, while at the same time unlawfully knowing of one of these instances because of his fingerprints taken at the time of arrest. We cannot assume that the jury applied the limiting instructions to the information on the fingerprint card.