Ga. Supreme Court upholds murder conviction in DeKalb County shooting

ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court of Georgia has unanimously upheld the murder conviction and life prison sentence a young man received in DeKalb County for shooting and killing an innocent bystander who was sitting in his car at a traffic light.

In an opinion, written by Justice Robert Benham, the high court rejected Stanquise Ramon Bell’s claim that his trial attorney was ineffective and concludes that the evidence was “sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find appellant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes for which he was convicted.”

A jury in September 2011 convicted Bell of murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, and he was sentenced to life plus five years in prison. Bell appealed on the basis that his trial attorney’s ineffectiveness violated his constitutional rights, arguing that the attorney failed to object at several key points during the trial, including when she failed to object to the prosecutor’s question of the state’s star witness in which he conveyed to the jury his belief in the witness’s credibility.