Court Opinion

ID: 9577771
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:37:58.461685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:21:15.444598
License: Public Domain

HUNSTEIN, Presiding Justice,
dissenting.
Because I believe that the trial court erred in its charge to the jury regarding the effect of the victim’s infidelity on Shields’ state of mind at the time of the shooting,5 I must respectfully dissent.
1. In Ricketts v. State, 276 Ga. 466 (579 SE2d 205) (2003), this Court upheld the use of a jury instruction on adultery almost verbatim to that given here. The charge given in Ricketts was modeled after the Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions in effect at that time, which stated, in pertinent part:
To kill either a spouse or the spouse’s lover for past acts of adultery or to prevent the apparent commission or the *378completion of an act of adultery in progress between them, nothing else appearing, is murder.
Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, Criminal Cases, § 4 (B) (3) (2d ed. 1991). Three members of the Ricketts court, while concurring in the judgment, wrote separately to admonish that “the jury instruction on adultery in murder cases needs to be replaced.” Id. at 475 (Fletcher, C. J., concurring specially, joined by Sears, E J., and Carley, J.). This was so, the concurring Justices argued, because the charge
fails to fully apprise the jury of the law of this State that adulterous conduct can serve as sufficient provocation to reduce homicide from murder to voluntary manslaughter. This jury charge relies upon a vague statement “nothing else appearing” to substitute for the principle that a jury may convict on the lesser offense of manslaughter if it finds that the defendant acted solely as the result of a serious provocation that excites a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion.
(Footnotes omitted.) Id. In other words, the charge fails to make clear to the jury that adulterous conduct may itself constitute sufficient provocation to downgrade a killing to voluntary manslaughter.
In recognition of the validity of this point, the drafters of the Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions thereafter deleted the “nothing else appearing” language from the pattern charge and added language specifically stating that “[y]ou may consider whether adultery amounts to provocation, which would mitigate the killing.” Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, Criminal Cases, § 2.10.13 (4th ed. 2007).6 This change in the pattern charge reflects a consensus view among trial judges in this State that an adultery charge is incomplete and potentially misleading when it fails to make explicit the notion that adultery may constitute provocation sufficient to mitigate a killing. It is time for this Court to expressly adopt this position as well.
Accordingly, because the charge given was susceptible to the erroneous interpretation that adultery could not form the basis for a finding of provocation sufficient to mitigate the killing, and because there was ample evidence that the killing was committed “as the result of a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion” inflamed by the *379victim’s adulterous conduct, OCGA § 16-5-2 (a), I would reverse Shields’ murder conviction. See Strickland v. State, 257 Ga. 230 (2) (357 SE2d 85) (1987) (reversing murder conviction due to erroneous jury charge on effect of adultery).
Decided May 4, 2009.
Gerard B. Kleinrock, for appellant.
Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, District Attorney, Barbara B. Conroy, Leonora Grant, Assistant District Attorneys, Thurbert E. Baker, Attorney General, Amy E. Hawkins Morelli, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.
2. In addition, I write to note my disagreement with the majority’s analysis in Division 1. I concur fully in the majority’s conclusion that there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s finding that the shooting was the cause of the victim’s death. However, I believe the appropriate analysis centers not on whether the medical evidence was direct versus circumstantial but rather whether the evidence supported the finding of proximate causation:
“Where one inflicts an unlawful injury, such injury is to be accounted as the efficient, proximate cause of death, whenever it shall be made to appear, either that (1) the injury itself constituted the sole proximate cause of the death; or that (2) the injury directly and materially contributed to the happening of a subsequent accruing immediate cause of the death; or that (3) the injury materially accelerated the death, although proximately occasioned by a pre-existing cause.”
(Citation omitted.) James v. State, 250 Ga. 655, 656 (300 SE2d 492) (1983). Accord Phillips v. State, 260 Ga. 742 (3) (399 SE2d 202) (1991). The testimony of the pathologist, as recounted in Division 1, was more than sufficient to support a finding that the shooting directly and materially contributed to the intracerebral hemorrhage that caused the victim’s death. In my view, no further analysis or discussion of this issue is necessary.
I am authorized to state that Chief Justice Sears and Justice Carley join in Division 1 of this dissent.

 Though the victim and Shields were never married, “adulterous conduct can be the provocation sufficient to warrant a conviction for manslaughter . . . even if the defendant and the victim are not married.” (Citations omitted.) Culmer v. State, 282 Ga. 330, 335 (4) (647 SE2d 30) (2007).

 This change appeared first in the Third Edition of the Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, published prior to Shields’ 2005 trial. See Suggested Pattern Jury Instructions, § 2.03.13 (3d ed. 2003).