Court Opinion

ID: 9571670
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:34:05.579574+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:30:47.333024
License: Public Domain

Hunt, Presiding Justice,
concurring.
I agree with the result achieved in the foregoing opinion, but I write separately to consider the scope of Edge.
Head’s argument that our decision in Edge v. State, 261 Ga. 865 (414 SE2d 463) (1992), requires a reversal of his conviction because of a sequential charge is inapt. Head was convicted of malice murder, not felony murder. A malice murder conviction does not invoke the sequential charge error addressed in Edge.3 That error exists only in the context of the problem in Edge, where voluntary manslaughter could be automatically subsumed by felony murder when the homicide occurs as the result of an aggravated assault upon the victim — an aggravated assault that might have been the result of provocation which could be found to constitute mitigation sufficient for a verdict of voluntary manslaughter. Malice murder, both by statutory definition and by the court’s jury instructions in this case, excludes as a matter of law any consideration of voluntary manslaughter. Malice murder simply negates the element of mitigation, precluding a finding by the jury of voluntary manslaughter. This is so because the jury, in order to return a verdict of malice murder, necessarily decides that the killing was done without mitigation or provocation. On the other hand, before the Edge decision, a jury could automatically arrive at a felony murder conviction on facts which would have authorized a voluntary manslaughter conviction as well. The evil of the sequential charge was that it encouraged such an automatic finding of felony murder.
*801Decided February 25, 1993.
Steven P. Berne, Michael Mears, for appellant.
Robert E. Wilson, District Attorney, Robert W. Houman, Stacy Y. Cole, Assistant District Attorneys, Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General, Susan V. Boleyn, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Rachelle L. Strausner, Staff Attorney, for appellee.

 Even so, the better practice would be for a trial court not to predicate the jury’s consideration of voluntary manslaughter upon a finding of not guilty of malice murder. Our objection to “sequential” charges is not so much the order in which the crimes are defined by the trial court as it is the requirement that the jury reject one crime before proceeding even to a consideration of another.