Hyrax
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- Aug 1, 2011
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I respectfully disagree. I haven't had a chance to read the case law you quoted, but the quotation itself indicates (to me, at least) that the affidavit does need to sufficiently inform the accused of the specific charges against him. I think Buford was raising a legitimate challenge to the specificity of the affidavit based on the affidavit itself and the detective's own admission during the commitment hearing.
The charge is murder. There is no need to name the exact statute used for purposes of the affidavit, but in this case we know which one it is, because Georgia only has one murder statute, § 16-5-1. That contains both felony murder and malice aforethought murder. But again, note that a felony murder can also be a malice murder, or not.
The affidavit provided that there is probable cause to believe that McDaniel committed a malice murder. It does not need to detail each element, that is what the indictment will do.
In this case, the affidavit did in fact detail a malice murder -- the discussing the plan for the murder ahead of time gets you the malice aforethought.
If the state wants to make this an indictment for felony murder (perhaps to get an easier shot at the death penalty) then they can still do that. They just weren't required to specifically clarify that prior to an indictment.
Edited to Add: What Buford tried to do was bring in confusion caused from Winters' statement at the press conference that McD was being charged with felony murder. The affidavit, by itself, was not objectionable or confusing -- it's only ambiguous in light of external matters. Without the press statement to bring up, and the witness being somewhat inept (although as a witness he's not supposed to deal with legal questions anyway), Buford wouldn't have had much to talk about. But those things aren't relevant to the argument he was trying to make.