A DeKalb County jury found a man guilty of committing a series of sexual assaults more than 39 years ago, resolving a case that had gone cold for years until recent policy changes pushed local law enforcement agencies to start clearing crime lab backlogs.
Jeffrey Briney, now 61 and in a wheelchair, was found guilty on all 29 charges, including rape, kidnapping, aggravated assault, armed robbery, sodomy and firearm charges for his alleged involvement in two separate home invasion rape cases in DeKalb County in 1986, one in March and the other in October.
Sentencing will take place in two to three weeks, according to DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Tangela M. Barrie.
His brother, David Briney, also faces charges for the March incident, but his trial has not yet been scheduled. He is also linked to decades-old sexual assault cases in Cobb and Fulton counties.
Both were arrested Feb. 27, 2024, indicted in March 2024 and remain in jail without bond.
“New DNA testing completed in 2023 linked these defendants to seven sexual cold case assaults dating back nearly 40 years,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said when she announced the indictments.
For three days, jurors heard from some of the victims, investigators and multiple scientists who analyzed DNA evidence that linked Jeffrey Briney to the alleged sexual assault incidents at two separate apartment complexes on March 28, 1986, and Oct. 27, 1986.
The jury returned a guilty verdict after less than four hours of deliberations.
“When you go back there and go through the testimony of those victims, you will find that Jeffrey Briney, not based on identification by pointing someone out, it was his DNA that were in these sexual assault kits,” Senior Assistant District Attorney Agatha Romanowski told jurors during closings.
In the March 28 incident, four men, including Jeffrey Briney, pushed their way into an apartment on Briarwood Road where five college students were held at gunpoint and two women were raped.
Months later, two men, including Briney, forced their way into an apartment on Buford Highway where two women were raped and hogtied. One of the victims testified the two men came in and pointed a gun at her head.
Victims testified during trial they could hear Briney and the other suspects laughing and joking around while they were being sexually assaulted.
“This was a joke to them. A joke to Jeffrey Briney was the most horrific moment in these women’s lives,” Romanowski said.
The case is the latest in a series of similar cold cases the DA office has prosecuted. A new push by Boston and her office has prompted numerous cases, including some that are decades old, to resurface.
Through the use of federal grants and new DNA testing technology, Boston’s office has been able to reopen and bring indictments against suspects allegedly involved in sexual assaults, murders and other crimes, with some even resulting in convictions.
Jeffery Briney’s defense attorney Mary Dayton said during closing the state hadn’t sufficiently shown Briney had been there when the people were assaulted, while acknowledging what the victims went through was terrible.
“I believe that my client did not do it, but I’m not going to sit up here, pretend and try to convince you that didn’t occur,” Dayton said.
Dayton said nobody had personally identified her client during testimony and tried to poke holes in the chain of custody for the sexual assault kits, drawing attention to the fact they were collected in 1986 and they weren’t tested until recently. She also questioned the DNA at the center of this case.
“DNA evidence, in our society, feels like this gold standard, the most scientific thing in the world, that is just spitting out objective answers. The reality is that it is full of subjective judgment calls,” she said.
In 2016, the Georgia Legislature passed a law requiring all Georgia law enforcement agencies to send stored rape kits to the GBI headquarters for testing. There are more than 7,000 kits dating back to before 1999, a backlog the GBI is still working through.
A federal grant allowed the GBI to send 2,500 kits to private labs for processing in 2023, including 74 kits from DeKalb County cases.
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