Court Opinion

ID: 9588786
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:38:48.359927+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:49:28.771256
License: Public Domain

Beasley, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in all but Division 1 (a), from which I respectfully dissent. The majority does not take into account the 1987 Supreme Court cases of Cooper v. State, 256 Ga. 631 (352 SE2d 382) (1987) and Richardson v. State, 256 Ga. 746 (353 SE2d 342) (1987), or the 1997 case of Brown v. State, 268 Ga. 154 (486 SE2d 178) (1997). They succeeded Drake v. State, 239 Ga. 232 (236 SE2d 748) (1977), upon which the majority depends. The trial court correctly charged the jury on this point, instructing that “[s]exual acts directed at children are, in law, forcible and against the will of the child.” The charge is not in the pattern charge book, see Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, Vol. II: Criminal Cases (2nd ed. 1991), although it contains revisions as recent as August 1996.
Applying the law in force at the time of Collins’ acts in 1994, his conviction of rape must be affirmed. See the special concurrence in Durr v. State, 229 Ga. App. 103 (493 SE2d 210) (1997). This Court’s opinion in Edmonson v. State, 219 Ga. App. 323, 324 (2) (464 SE2d 839) (1995), should not be overruled.
The trial court merged the rape and statutory rape verdicts for sentencing and conviction purposes, as the law requires. OCGA § 16-1-7 (a).
I am authorized to state that Judge Eldridge joins in this opinion.