Tucker v. State

In the Supreme Court of Georgia

Decided: September 16, 2025

S25A0556. TUCKER v. THE STATE.

PINSON, Justice.

Shantony Tucker was convicted of malice murder and other

crimes related to the death of his girlfriend, Brea Mance, and his

cover-up of that crime.1 On appeal, Tucker contends that the evi-

dence was not sufficient to support the convictions because it did not

1 Mance died between August 11 and August 12, 2017. A Warren County

grand jury charged Tucker with malice murder (Count 1), felony murder
(Count 2) aggravated assault, family violence (Count 3), arson in the first de-
gree (Count 4), and concealing the death of another (Count 5). After a jury trial
from April 1, 2019, to April 4, 2019, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on each
count. On April 18, 2019, Tucker was sentenced to life without the possibility
of parole for malice murder, followed by a consecutive term of 20 years for arson
in the first degree. He was also sentenced to a term of ten years imprisonment
for concealing the death of another, to run concurrent with the sentence for
arson. The felony murder was vacated by operation of law. The court merged
the aggravated assault count with the vacated felony murder count, but the
aggravated assault count should have merged with the malice murder count
instead. See Malcolm v. State, 263 Ga. 369, 373–74 (1993). Nonetheless, we
decline to exercise our discretion to correct the merger error because it has not
been raised and does not harm Tucker. See, e.g., Dixon v. State, 302 Ga. 691,
696–98 (2017).
exclude the possibility that Tucker killed Mance by accident or in

self-defense and that the trial court failed to perform its role as the

“thirteenth juror” at the motion for new trial stage. For the reasons

that follow, we reject these claims, so Tucker’s convictions are af-

firmed.2

Tucker timely filed a motion for new trial on April 26, 2019, which he
later amended through new counsel. The motion was heard on November 28,
2023, and denied on December 8, 2023. Tucker timely filed a notice of appeal
on December 26, 2023. His appeal was docketed to the April 2025 term of court
and submitted for a decision on the briefs.
2 Tucker’s initial brief filed with this Court included no citations to the

record and four citations to decisions that do not exist. This Court ordered
Tucker’s counsel to show cause why the appeal should not be vacated and re-
manded to the trial court to determine if counsel had abandoned Tucker. In
response, Tucker’s counsel asserted that the citations to nonexistent decisions
were scrivener’s errors, and he provided substitute citations and offered to file
a corrected brief. Comparing the original and substituted citations, those er-
rors would have included citing a combination of the incorrect volume, page
number, and even case name, year, and court, for multiple cited decisions. The
substitute citations point to decisions that support the general propositions for
which they were cited, although those propositions were general enough that
a large number of decisions might have been substituted in support. In light of
this response, we struck Tucker’s initial brief and ordered him to refile it with
corrected citations. He did so within the time prescribed by the Court, and we
decide his appeal based on the corrected brief.
Whatever doubts one could have about the explanation Tucker’s counsel
gave in his response to the show-cause order, questions about the veracity of
counsel’s representations, which would necessarily require assessment of cred-
ibility, are generally not for this Court to answer in the first instance in the
context of an appeal dealing with a different matter. We have forwarded all
filings related to this matter to the Office of the General Counsel of the State
Bar of Georgia.

2
1. The evidence at trial showed the following. Tucker and

Mance had been in an on-and-off romantic relationship for almost a

year up until the time of her death. On the morning of August 11,

2017, Mance’s cousin called and spoke to her on the phone. Her

cousin also said hello to Tucker, whom she had heard speaking in

the background. Tucker left to go to the store, and then Mance sent

her cousin screenshots from social media of a baby she believed to

be Tucker’s. Mance also told her cousin that she and Tucker had

gotten into a “fistfight” a few days earlier. Mance said she planned

to leave Tucker but had not told him yet.

Later that day and the next morning, Mance’s family members

and friends could not reach her, and she did not show up for a

planned outing. Also on the morning of August 12, Tucker called his

brother, who lived nearby, and asked him to check on Mance at their

home. When Tucker’s brother arrived at the home, it was on fire.

Tucker’s brother tried to go inside, but the smoke drove him back

out, and he called 911. Firefighters arrived and found Mance inside

the home. One of the firefighters, who was also a paramedic, checked

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for a pulse but could not find one. Once firefighters moved Mance

outside, the deputy coroner pronounced her dead.

A fire investigator from the State Fire Marshal’s Office was

called to Mance and Tucker’s home on the afternoon of August 12.

Based on his investigation, he opined that the fire was intentionally

set.

GBI Agents interviewed Tucker for the first time on August 15.

He said that he had been with friends on the night of August 11 and

spent the night with another woman. He said he tried to call Mance

“several times” that night. When he returned home the next morn-

ing, he saw his home was on fire, contacted his mother, and told her

to call 911.

Investigators obtained search warrants for Mance’s and

Tucker’s phone records. The phone records “cast doubt on” Tucker’s

account because they placed his cell phone in the area where he and

Mance lived during the early morning hours of August 12 and, con-

trary to Tucker’s statement, the phone records did not show that he

tried to call Mance several times on the night of August 11.

4
GBI Agents interviewed Tucker again on August 18. During

the second interview, Tucker told investigators that Mance had

taken diet pills and had a “reaction.” He said she passed out and had

been lying on the floor for 15 minutes when a friend picked up

Tucker, and he left. Tucker said he went back to check on Mance

around 5:00 a.m. the next morning, found her in a different spot

than where she had been when he left, and smelled smoke. He said

he then left the home and denied having anything to do with the fire

that was later discovered or Mance’s death.

Later in the interview, however, Tucker admitted that he set

the home on fire. He said that he thought Mance had overdosed on

the diet pills she had taken, and he set the fire to cover up her death.

Still later in the interview, Tucker said that he had “strangled”

or “choked” Mance but had not meant to do so. He said that Mance

had been upset when she learned he had a child with another

woman, she pointed a gun at him, and he grabbed her by the throat

and “took her to the ground,” where he held her until she went

“limp.”

5
The medical examiner testified that Mance died as a result of

“neck compression,” but he could not determine the “mechanism” of

compression. When asked whether Mance could have died from the

“carotid sinus reflex,” which can be caused by a “very minor grabbing

of the neck,” the medical examiner responded that it was possible

but “exceedingly rare” for death to occur from the carotid sinus re-

flex. The medical examiner testified that, even if the “mechanism of

compression” was carotid sinus reflex, he would still classify the

death as a homicide “based on the circumstances.”

The medical examiner also determined that Mance was already

dead when the fire started and ruled out the fire as a cause of death.

The medical expert called by the defense agreed with the medical

examiner that Mance was dead when the fire started because there

was no evidence of smoke inhalation, but opined that the autopsy

alone did not show what caused Mance’s death. So, in the expert’s

opinion, the medical examiner could have reached his conclusion

that the cause of death was “neck compression” based only on

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Tucker’s statement that he had strangled her and not from the med-

ical evidence; he would have classified Mance’s cause of death as

“unknown.” When asked about death from the carotid sinus reflex,

the expert explained that this cause of death would not be evident

from the autopsy and that, in his experience, it happens when “one

person squeez[es] on another person’s neck and that person just

drop[s] and d[ies] right then and there,” which the doctor performing

the autopsy would know from witnesses to the death.

2. Tucker contends that the evidence was not sufficient as a

matter of Georgia statutory law because the evidence did not exclude

the possibility that Mance’s death was the result of an accident or

self-defense.3

Under OCGA § 24-14-6, a conviction based solely on circum-

stantial evidence must be supported by evidence sufficient to “ex-

clude every other reasonable hypothesis save that of the guilt of the

3 To the extent Tucker contends that the trial court failed to assess the

evidence of self-defense, and this could be read as invoking the general
grounds, it fails for the reasons set out in the next division.
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accused.” But OCGA § 24-14-6 applies only when the evidence is en-

tirely circumstantial, see Towers v. State, 314 Ga. 838, 841 (2022),

and here, there is direct evidence of Tucker’s guilt, including his

statement to the police that he strangled Mance until she went

“limp” and then set their home on fire to cover up her death. So

OCGA § 24-14-6 does not apply, and his claim that the evidence was

not sufficient as a matter of Georgia statutory law fails.4 See Mack

v. State, — Ga. — (2025), S25A0773, slip op. at 10 (Ga. Aug. 26,

2025).

3. Tucker contends that the trial court failed to meet its obliga-

tions under OCGA § 5-5-20, which authorizes a trial court to grant

a new trial “[i]n any case when the verdict of a jury is found contrary

to evidence and the principles of justice and equity.” On appeal from

4 Although Tucker makes a passing reference to the federal due process

standard for sufficiency, see Jackson v. Virginia, 443 US 307 (1979), he has not
offered any argument that the evidence was not sufficient under that standard
and instead focuses on the contention that the State did not exclude every rea-
sonable hypothesis except Tucker’s guilt, see OCGA § 24-14-6. So any consti-
tutional sufficiency claim under Jackson is deemed abandoned. See Byrd v.
State, 321 Ga. 222, 225–26 (2025) (under the current version of Rule 22, “liti-
gants must do more than just make an argument or cite authority, but must
now ensure that argument, citation to authority, and citation to the record are
all present to avoid having an enumeration deemed abandoned”).
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the denial of a motion under this Code Section, this Court reviews

“whether the trial court exercised its discretion as the thirteenth ju-

ror, but the decision to grant a new trial on the general grounds is

vested solely in the trial court and is not subject to our review.” Wes-

ton v. State, 320 Ga. 472, 475 (2024) (quotation marks omitted).

Here, the trial court’s order reflects that it exercised its discretion

as the thirteenth juror, so we do not review further the trial court’s

decision to deny a new trial after doing so. Id.

Judgment affirmed. All the Justices concur.

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