The Supreme Court of Georgia addressed the trial court’s admission of other-acts evidence concerning an alleged 2015 choking and false-imprisonment incident involving Octavia Everett and appellant Jquantae Jester. Over Jester’s objection, the trial court allowed the State to present Everett’s trial testimony from the earlier case and Jester’s subsequent guilty plea to false imprisonment; the prosecutor read Everett’s testimony into the record after representing that Everett was unavailable to testify at the Jester trial.

The court assumed, without deciding, that admitting the other-acts evidence for motive and intent could have been an abuse of discretion under OCGA § 24-4-404(b), which generally bars other-crimes evidence offered to prove character but permits it for limited purposes. The opinion concluded any such error was harmless because of substantial independent evidence of Jester’s guilt: Jester’s recorded statements to investigators describing strangulation and smothering, fingerprint evidence on the container, packing tape, and bag covering Myra Parlier’s head, cell-site location information placing a phone associated with Jester near Parlier’s home and later on I-75 where the body was found, surveillance showing postmortem use of Parlier’s cards by Jester, and other corroborating physical evidence.

The court noted that the trial judge repeatedly instructed the jury about the limited purpose for which the other-acts testimony could be used and that jurors are ordinarily presumed to follow such instructions. The opinion cited cases applying harmless-error review where trial courts admitted similar evidence and emphasized that intent and motive were not central disputed issues in Jester’s trial, reducing the potential prejudicial effect of the other-acts material.

The opinion also observed that the prosecutor used some propensity-based language in opening and closing argument, but the court held that given the jury instructions and the strength of the corroborating evidence, that misuse did not alter the harmless-error conclusion.