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238 Ga. 560

233 S.E.2d 793

Miller v. State

Supreme Court of Georgia

Decided March 10, 1977

Supreme Court of Georgia · decided 1977-03-10

Relies on Hill v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1977-03-10

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently June 1995

5 state decisions

20197719801990decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Undercofler, Presiding Justice,

¶1dissenting.

¶2I dissent to Division lof the majority opinion which follows Hill v. State, 236 Ga. 831 (225 SE2d 281) (1976), to which I also dissented. It holds that an accomplice’s testimony of crimes other than the one on trial, which are admissible to show motive, scheme, and intent, must also be corroborated by independent evidence linking the defendant to those other crimes. This is an unnecessary extension of the corroboration rule.

¶3The accomplice’s testimony in Georgia is viewed with some skepticism based on the question of that witness’ credibility. In order to satisfy that credibility problem, some independent evidence of the accused’s participation in the crime on trial is required by law. Code Ann. § 38-121. Only slight evidence is necessary, and the accomplice’s testimony need not be corroborated in every material part. Once so corroborated, however, all his testimony is admissible because its credibility has been thus bolstered. Wigmore on Evidence § 2056. This reasoning should extend to whatever testimony the accomplice offers without the necessity of further *564corroboration of that portion of his testimony concerning other related offenses.

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