Georgia Supreme Court reverses murder conviction of man who killed security guard
ATLANTA GA January 15 2020 The Georgia Supreme Court reversed a Fulton County murder conviction and life sentence, it announced Monday, because a jury was not properly instructed at trial.
Matthew Doyle was convicted in 2013 of the December 2010 revenge killing of security guard Lyndon “Pookie” Tucker.
According to the court, the murder involved Doyle and three other men targeting Tucker at his place of work, Midtown Towing in Atlanta, after a nightclub fight involving Tucker’s girlfriend’s cousin.
The court said after the fight, Doyle and the three men discussed “hurting somebody” and “getting payback” for the fight, and targeted Tucker for his association with the cousin, known as “Poochie.”
Around 4 a.m. the night of Dec. 17, 2010, the court said, the men drove to Midtown Towing. Doyle jumped out and shot Tucker at least eight times with a “high-velocity Ak-47 type of rifle,” and fled.
Tucker later died from the gunshot wounds.
The court said the issue was not the evidence, which was enough to find Doyle guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in the murder. The issue was in the jury instructions.
The Supreme Court, in a summary of its ruling, said it “finds the trial court erred by failing to instruct the jury about the corroboration the law requires in felony cases where the only witness testifying against a defendant is an accomplice.”
In this case, testimony that led to Doyle’s conviction came, in part, from Keith Richardson, who prosecutors said drove Doyle and the two others to Midtown Towing.
Georgia law requires corroborating evidence when the testimony comes from an accomplice for felony trials. According to the court, this was provided at the trial in the form of a woman, Kerry Henderson, who had contacted detectives after the shooting. She said at trial she couldn’t remember what she’d told detectives, but a detective testified she told him she was told the day after Tucker’s murder by “Fat Lewis” and “Matt” (understood to be another accomplice, Lewis Parks, and Doyle) that they had shot “Pookie.”
The court said this satisfied the requirement for corroborating evidence of accomplice testimony, but “the trial court did not instruct the jury to determine if Richardson was an accomplice, nor did it include the accomplice-corroboration charge in its instruction to the jury.”
“While Henderson’s and the detective’s testimony may serve as legally sufficient corroboration of Richardson’s testimony, the jury was never instructed how to properly evaluate this evidence, and it is likely that the jury convicted Doyle on Richardson’s testimony alone, which the jury was affirmatively told that it could do,” the court’s opinion says. “Because the jury did not receive proper instructions on how to evaluate the evidence, we conclude that the outcome of the proceedings was likely affected by the trial court’s failure to give the accomplice-corroboration charge.”
Therefore, Doyle’s conviction has been vacated.
The court did say the state may choose to re-try Doyle, because the evidence was sufficient to support his conviction.
