The Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously affirmed on Thursday the May 2015 conviction of Chaddy Brooks for the murder of her boyfriend.
A Lowndes County jury convicted Brooks, 30, last spring of second-degree murder in the Nov. 22, 2013 stabbing death of her boyfriend, 37-year-old Danielle Gore. Judge Jim Kitchens sentenced Brooks to 40 years in prison.
According to the decision, Brooks looked through Gore’s cell phone while he was in the bathroom on the morning of Nov. 22 and found text messages from another woman. When she confronted him about the messages, the confrontation became physical, and Brooks stabbed Gore in the neck with a kitchen knife.
Brooks appealed her conviction on two points: She claimed that there wasn’t enough sufficient evidence to support the jury’s verdict for second-degree murder and that her trial attorney, Rob Laher, provided ineffective assistance because he failed to renew a motion for a directed verdict after all evidence was presented.
However, the court denied Brooks’ appeal in an opinion authored by Presiding Justice Jess H. Dickinson.
“Viewing the evidence as a whole, we find that sufficient evidence supported the jury’s verdict of second-degree murder,” Dickinson wrote. “The evidence presented shows that Brooks introduced a deadly weapon into a heated argument at a time when she was not being threatened, thus demonstrating the requisite disregard for human life.”
According to the decision, Gore did not have a weapon at any point during the argument.
In the decision, Dickinson noted that Brooks’ attorney did motion for a directed verdict after the state rested its case in chief but did not renew it after all evidence in the trial was presented. However, he noted that Lahar filed a motion for either a new trial or a judgment notwithstanding the verdict, which would allow the judge to overrule the jury’s decision.
“This post-trial motion gave the lower court an opportunity to review the sufficiency and the weight of the State’s evidence,” he wrote. “Therefore, we find that the failure to renew the motion for a directed verdict was not ineffective assistance of counsel.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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