Summary
The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed Marco Cordero’s convictions for felony murder and cruelty to children arising from the death of a four-year-old child. The court rejected his ineffective-assistance claim and held that the earlier cruelty-to-children offense, based on injuries inflicted months before the fatal acts, did not merge into the felony-murder conviction for sentencing purposes.
Topics
Practice areas
Questions Presented
- Whether trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective in proposing the trial court's answers to the jury's questions concerning causation and felony murder.
- Whether the evidence was sufficient to support Cordero's convictions.
- Whether the separate cruelty-to-children conviction based on conduct from September through December 2007 merged as a matter of fact into the felony-murder conviction based on conduct occurring January 16 through January 18, 2008.
Holdings
- The evidence was sufficient for a rational jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Cordero committed the offenses of which he was convicted.
- Cordero failed to establish ineffective assistance because, even assuming counsel performed deficiently by failing to request a fuller proximate-cause instruction, there was no reasonable probability that the result of the trial would have been different.
- The cruelty-to-children conviction based on conduct from September through December 2007 did not merge as a matter of fact into the felony-murder conviction based on conduct from January 16 through January 18, 2008, and the trial court properly imposed a separate sentence.
Key quotations
“Moreover, once the jury found that Appellant had committed the underlying felony of cruelty to children, there was no dispute that the beatings that constituted that crime were the proximate cause of the victim’s death.” (296 Ga. at 712)
“Under all the foregoing circumstances, we conclude that the crime of cruelty to children, based on the non-fatal injuries that occurred from September to December 2007, is an independent crime that does not merge with the crime of felony murder, based on the events of January 16 to January 18, 2008.” (296 Ga. at 719)
Factual background
Cordero lived with his wife, their children, including four-year-old Mark Mendez, and a family friend. The evidence showed that Cordero repeatedly beat and otherwise abused the child from September through December 2007 and again from January 16 through January 18, 2008, including striking him with household objects, tying him up, and refusing to obtain timely medical care. The child arrived at the hospital unresponsive and died shortly thereafter; medical experts attributed the death to generalized blunt-force trauma and the accumulation of injuries. The jury rejected Cordero's claim that the child had injured himself or that his wife had inflicted the injuries.
Procedural history
A Fulton County jury convicted Cordero on March 7, 2011, of felony murder predicated on cruelty to children, cruelty to children in the first degree for conduct occurring in January 2008, aggravated assault, and a separate cruelty-to-children count for conduct occurring from September through December 2007. The trial court sentenced him to life imprisonment for felony murder and twenty years concurrently for the January cruelty-to-children conviction, and separately sentenced him on the earlier cruelty-to-children conviction. The trial court denied Cordero's amended motion for new trial on June 21, 2013; he filed a notice of appeal on July 15, 2013. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed.