Court Filings

The Court of Appeals reviewed five consolidated appeals arising from a Fulton County trial court’s appointment of a special master to manage pretrial matters in mass-tort litigation. Plaintiffs challenged the appointment, the denial of their indigency claims without a hearing, the contempt finding for nonpayment of special-master fees, and the order requiring payment of pro-rata fees. Defendants challenged the trial court’s imposition of joint-and-several liability for payment of the special-master fees. The appellate court affirmed the appointment in part, vacated the contempt ruling for lack of the required hearing on indigency, remanded for further proceedings, and vacated the joint-and-several-liability provision in the appointment order.

The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed most of Calvin Sneed’s convictions for the 2017 fatal shooting of Gregory Jones but found merger and sentencing errors. The court rejected Sneed’s claims that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to object to two prosecutor remarks during closing argument, concluding those remarks were permissible inferences from the evidence and that objections would have been meritless. However, the court held that two firearm convictions (Counts 7 and 8) should have merged with Count 9, vacated those convictions and sentences, and remanded for correction of the sentence summary to reflect the proper 15-year term for Count 9.

The Georgia Supreme Court reviewed Alex Khalil Smith’s appeal of his 2022 convictions for malice murder and related offenses arising from the July 8, 2020 shooting death of Cassandra Arnold. The Court held that the evidence was legally sufficient to support the convictions—pointing to motive from a shorted drug deal, cell-phone location data placing Smith at the scene near the time of the shooting, incriminating phone calls, and gunshot-residue on clothing and a mask. However, the Court vacated and remanded the trial court’s denial of Smith’s motion for new trial because the trial court failed to exercise and state its discretion under Georgia’s general grounds for a new trial.

The Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s confirmation of an arbitration award in favor of Spectrum and its award of prejudgment interest, but vacated and remanded solely to recalculate the prejudgment interest start date. Spectrum demanded payment of the fixed arbitration award by letter on December 9, 2020, and later sought confirmation when Amendia did not pay. The court held Spectrum’s demand (and its later oral request at a 2022 hearing) sufficed as a timely request for prejudgment interest under Georgia law, so interest must be awarded; however, interest should run from the expiration of the payment deadline set in the demand letter, not from the letter date itself.