Footnotes
External links
Category:Web design software
Category:Document management systems
Category:Page description languages
477 S.E.2d 329 (1996)
267 Ga. 183
COATES
v.
The STATE.
No. S96A0263.
Supreme Court of Georgia.
March 14, 1996.
*330 Edward F. Sykes, Jr., for appellant.
Daniel J. Craig, District Attorney, Charles R. Sheppard, Assistant District Attorney, Thurbert E. Baker, Attorney General, Paula K. Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, for appellee.
HUNSTEIN, Justice.
Wesley Coates was found guilty by a Floyd County jury of two counts of murder, and was sentenced to death for each murder. He appeals from the judgments of conviction and sentence.[1]
The evidence showed that on October 2, 1990, the victim, John Charles DiLeo, was found dead inside a house located at 1711 Dunwoody Road in Atlanta. He had been shot five times. Police found two spent.25 caliber shell casings at the scene, and an expert ballistics examiner testified that they were fired from the same gun. Coates, a resident of the house where the victim was found, admitted to police that he had shot the victim three times with a.25 caliber pistol he had purchased from a cousin. Coates also admitted that he had received stolen property, including the.25 caliber pistol, from his cousin. Coates's co-defendant, Ralph Dalton, the victim's brother, was apprehended in an Atlanta suburb three days later and confessed to the murder.
*331 Coates testified at trial that he shot the victim only twice and that the first shot was accidental. However, the record reveals that Coates's account of the events was not credible. He was impeached at trial through the testimony of several witnesses. Coates's friend, Robert Jordan, testified that he was in Coates's home and heard Coates say he had shot the victim twice in the head and once in the shoulder. Coates's neighbor, William Griffin, testified that Coates told him he had been drinking and that he and Dalton had beaten the victim and left him to die in the woods. Two other witnesses testified that they had seen Coates and the victim together on the day of the murder.
1. Coates asserts that the trial court erred in denying
Related links: