James Adams Jr. v. State

Court of Appeals of the State of Georgia

ATLANTA,____________________ January 11, 2018

The Court of Appeals hereby passes the following order: A18A0919. JAMES ADAMS JR. v. THE STATE.

In June 2000, a jury found James Adams, Jr., guilty of armed robbery and theft of a motor vehicle, and we affirmed his convictions on appeal in an unpublished opinion. See Adams v. State, Case No. A01A1121 (decided October 2, 2001). In 2016, Adams filed an extraordinary motion for new trial, which the trial court denied. The trial court later denied Adams’s motion for an out-of-time appeal. Adams sought discretionary review of the denial of his motion for an out-of- time appeal, arguing that he was unable to file a timely application regarding the denial of his extraordinary motion for new trial because the trial court did not notify him of the denial. This Court denied his application, but advised Adams that his remedy, under the circumstances, was to petition the trial court to set aside and re- enter its previous order denying his extraordinary motion for new trial as a means of correcting the problem. See Case No. A18D0109 (decided October 11, 2017).1 Adams then filed a motion urging the trial court to set aside and re-enter its order denying his motion for an out-of-time appeal, which the trial court also denied. Adams filed both an application for discretionary appeal and the instant direct appeal seeking review of the denial of his motion to set aside and re-enter the order denying his motion for an out-of-time appeal. We denied Adams’s discretionary

1 We dismissed Adams’s direct appeal of the trial court’s denial of his motion for out-of-time appeal because the denial of Adams’s discretionary application constituted a decision on the merits such that the doctrine of res judicata barred his direct appeal from the same order. See Case No. A18A0566 (decided November 3, 2017).

application on December 20, 2017, see Case No. A18D0218, and that denial constituted a decision on the merits. See Elrod v. Sunflower Meadows Dev., LLC, 322 Ga. App. 666, 670 (4) (745 SE2d 846) (2013) (“[W]hen this Court examines a request for a discretionary appeal, it acts in an error-correcting mode such that a denial of the application is on the merits, and the order denying the application is res judicata with respect to the substance of the requested review.”) (punctuation omitted). Thus, the doctrine of res judicata bars this direct appeal from the same order. See Northwest Social & Civic Club v. Franklin, 276 Ga. 859, 860 (583 SE2d 858) (2003); Hook v. Bergen, 286 Ga. App. 258, 261 (1) (649 SE2d 313) (2007). Accordingly, this appeal is hereby DISMISSED.

Court of Appeals of the State of Georgia Clerk’s Office, Atlanta,____________________ 01/11/2018 I certify that the above is a true extract from the minutes of the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Witness my signature and the seal of said court hereto affixed the day and year last above written.

, Clerk.