Court Opinion

ID: 9845613
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:25:10.601643+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:16.146153
License: Public Domain

Clarke, Chief Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent as to Division 3 of the majority opinion. The references in the prosecutor’s closing argument to the pizza deliv*551ery person who was killed by the fourteen-year-old, leaving a six-week-old child motherless and a deaf husband widowed, and to the attack on a New York female jogger by a group of teenagers, were highly prejudicial to appellant. Conner v. State, 251 Ga. 113 (303 SE2d 266) (1983), is relied upon by the majority in its holding that the argument was within the wide latitude traditionally given in closing argument. However, Conner is not authority for the introduction of prejudicial references to matters not in evidence. In fact, citing Floyd v. State, 143 Ga. 286, 289 (84 SE 971) (1915), the court noted that “ ‘[w]hat the law condemns is the injection into the argument of extrinsic and prejudicial matters which have no basis in the evidence.’ ” 251 Ga. at 123. The references to the murder of the pizza delivery person and the attack on the New York female jogger are the type of extrinsic and prejudicial matters which are not within the wide latitude allowed in closing argument.
Decided November 16, 1990.
Jonathan Goldberg, for appellant.
Lewis R. Slaton, District Attorney, Joseph J. Drolet, Carl P. Greenberg, Nancy A. Grace, Assistant District Attorneys, Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General, C. A. Benjamin Woolf, for appellee.