DODGE COUNTY, Ga. — The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man accused of killing an elderly couple in Dodge County, the court ruled in a unanimous decision Tuesday.
According to the opinion, Demarcus Deshawn Blash and three other teens broke into the house of Wendall and Jain Williams in 2018 and shot the elderly couple to death.
The aim of the robbery, according to court documents, was to steal guns for the "Skullface" gang Blash was trying to get off the ground.
In 2021, Blash was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Blash was found to be the mastermind behind the plot, and the court found Blash personally shot Wendall with a .9mm firearm, the opinion read.
However, in his appeal, Blash made many arguments about why he thought the trial court erred in convicting him, but most of the arguments were procedural rather than based on the evidence against him.
In the 34-page decision, the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed almost all of the arguments Blash made, and they found the jury had enough evidence to convict Blash.
"Here, the evidence presented at trial and recited in part above was plainly sufficient to authorize the jury to find Appellant guilty of each offense for which he was convicted," the opinion read.
He was convicted of murder along with armed robbery and other charges connected to the break-in.
Instead of focusing on the facts of the case, Blash instead argued that a phone call he made from jail was improperly entered as evidence. He also took issue with an expert witnesses and other more technical procedural issues.
His phone calls from jail played in court showed Blash attempting to get information needed to intimidate a potential witness.
However, Blash made two arguments why those tapes should not have been played.
He said because the surveillance of his prison phone call was not authorized by a judge, the phone calls were not valid evidence. However, the court pointed to a previous judicial decision that found that was not the case.
Blash also took issue with the GBI expert. He argued that his testimony would prejudice the jury's view of him, and the jury would be unable to fairly assess Blash's guilt or innocence because of it.
But the court pointed out that, under rule 403, evidence in a criminal trial is inherently prejudicial. So Rule 403 says that the prejudicial nature of the evidence needs to be weighed against the evidence's usefulness to a case.
The Georgia Supreme Court said that the usefulness of the evidence outweighed any potential prejudice since it decoded Blash's phone call from jail. Plus, they say the testimony would not hurt Blash's ability to get a fair trial.
"Lastly, the expert testimony was not unfairly prejudicial because the jury heard evidence that Appellant planned to form a gang, and that was the motivation for the crimes," the court found.
Because of that, the testimony was "unlikely to 'inflame the passion of the jury for a reason that is irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of the defendant,'" the opinion read.
The court upheld the vast majority of the convictions against Blash and rejected his effort to secure a new trial.
The justices, however, did throw out Blash's conviction for burglary and one count of theft by taking since those charges should have been merged with his home invasion and armed robbery charges.
Three other Dodge County teens — Martez Gordon, Gary Pennamon and Kojack Thomas, Jr. — were convicted in the Williams' shooting death. They're serving life sentences with the possibility of parole.