A Fulton County judge has denied a new trial for Leslie Singleton, the Georgia man whose motion for post-conviction review was lost in the court system for more than two decades — a case that has highlighted how error-prone the state’s courts can be and raised pointed questions about how Georgia punishes young people convicted of violent crimes.
In a 15-page ruling issued Wednesday, Judge Robert McBurney acknowledged that the delay in Singleton’s case “frankly reeks of a systemic failure of due process” and found credible, unrebutted testimony that Singleton’s original trial attorney was deficient. But he concluded that the conviction itself was sound, and that the evidence against Singleton was strong enough that no amount of better lawyering would have changed the outcome.
“The system broke down here. Defendant has waited far too long for this ruling and the appeal that follows,” McBurney wrote in his decision, noting that the family of the victim, Melvin Grigley, an off-duty Atlanta Police Department sergeant, also were unable to experience closure because of the two-decade delay.
“Too many people have had to revisit difficult memories and painful times, long after they should have been allowed to move on,” he wrote.
The AJC attempted to reach out to Grigley’s family but has not heard back.
Singleton’s attorney, David Hoort, said he plans to appeal the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court.
Credit: Leslie Singleton
Credit: Leslie Singleton
In 2001, Singleton, then 17, was convicted of felony murder for his participation in an attempted carjacking gone awry. While he did not pull the trigger, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to life with parole. A court-appointed attorney filed a motion for a new trial three weeks later. But then 22 years passed with no hearing or decision. It wasn’t until McBurney received a July 2023 letter from Singleton that the oversight was discovered and the case was revived.
“It’s a procedural tragedy,” McBurney said in the spring of 2024 when the AJC first wrote about the debacle.
The judge then assigned Hoort, a former Michigan judge, to the case. In April 2024, Hoort filed an amended motion for a new trial. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office responded that June, maintaining that it believed Singleton, who is now 41, received a fair trial and sentence.
Hearings were subsequently held over the course of 2024 and 2025 for McBurney to listen to evidence from both sides.
While questions of why the case remained unresolved for decades weigh heavily, and were covered extensively in the AJC’s original investigation, the bigger question during the recent hearings was whether it was possible to give a proper assessment of the original trial.
With so much time having passed, the case had unusual obstacles. Files were missing, memories were less reliable and some of the key players had died.
One of Hoort’s central claims was that Singleton received ineffective counsel from his attorney Gary Guichard, who was repeatedly flagged by the state Supreme Court for failures in representing indigent defendants. In a typical claim of ineffective counsel, the trial attorney is called to the stand and given the chance to respond to allegations and explain their legal strategy. Guichard, however, died in 2014.
Without Guichard or his files, Hoort attempted to raise doubts about the attorney’s strategies by interviewing witnesses who attested that Guichard was prone to dozing off during trials, refused to discuss legal strategy with his teenage client, broke off communication after discovering Singleton had initially lied about his accomplices, and even urged Singleton to commit perjury. Singleton refused to do so.
McBurney found the testimony of Singleton and other defense witnesses on these points “credible” and noted it “stands unrebutted.” But under Georgia law, the legal test required Singleton to show not just that his lawyer was deficient, but that those errors likely changed the outcome of his trial. On that question, the judge concluded that “even errorless, peerless, spotless lawyering would not have overcome the simple strength of the State’s case.”
“The evidence that Defendant was an active participant in an attempted carjacking that resulted in the death of another was clear and unequivocal,” McBurney wrote in the decision filed Wednesday, explaining that Singleton’s ineffective assistance claim did not clear what the caselaw requires: proof of prejudice.
Singleton’s blood was found in Grigley’s car and in the street. A bullet from Grigley’s gun remains lodged in Singleton’s arm. And testimony from Singleton, as well as his co-defendant Michael Waters, who fired the fatal shot, placed the former teenager at the scene of the crime.
Credit: Atlanta Police Department
Credit: Atlanta Police Department
‘A looking glass into a sentencing scheme frozen in time’
In the years since his conviction, Singleton has earned his GED in prison, taken on leadership roles, completed numerous courses and self-published a book on positive thinking. A psychiatrist who examined him noted that his last sustained disciplinary violation was in 2014 and wrote that he “has shown considerable rehabilitation, remorse, and regret.”
None of that, however, was relevant to the motion for a new trial, which is narrowly focused on whether the original trial was conducted fairly.
For advocates who have followed the case, that gap between what the court can consider and who Singleton has become speaks to a larger problem.
Melissa Carter, executive director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University, said the outcome exposes problems in how Georgia punishes youth.
“Leslie’s lost motion is a looking glass into a sentencing scheme frozen in time, one that still punishes youth as the adults they have not yet become,” Carter said.
Singleton was among the first wave of Georgia juveniles prosecuted as adults under SB440, a 1994 law requiring children as young as 13 to be treated as adults and prosecuted in Superior Court if they were indicted for violent crimes such as rape, aggravated battery, armed robbery and murder.
Notably, the bill pushed children into the adult system not only when they committed malice murder, which is an intentional killing, but also felony murder, which occurs when a homicide takes place during the commission of another felony. For Singleton, his role in a carjacking that led to a killing made him eligible for felony murder, even though he did not pull the trigger. A conviction under felony murder carries an automatic sentence of life with parole.
In the two decades since Singleton was tried, the U.S. Supreme Court has made significant rulings on the sentencing of children, noting that they have diminished culpability, as their brains are not yet fully formed, and that they are more prone to peer pressure and reckless behavior. But those rulings could not be applied directly through a motion for a new trial.
And so Singleton’s only way of coming home now is up to the parole board.
An AJC review of Department of Corrections data, however, found that the parole board sparingly grants releases to young people serving life-with-parole sentences, and often after decades of waiting.
Singleton first became eligible in 2015 and has been denied release twice. The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles cited “an insufficient amount of time served due to the severe nature and circumstances of the crime.” He is next eligible for consideration in 2027.
What comes next
The ruling by McBurney on Wednesday clears the way for Singleton to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, a step he has been unable to take for a quarter century because his unresolved motion blocked the appellate process.
That appeal could raise not only the substantive claims from the motion but also whether the extraordinary delay itself constituted a due process violation.
McBurney’s order lays out a detailed case for why the delay was unacceptable, even as the judge ultimately ruled against Singleton on the question of prejudice.
In his ruling the judge noted an irony: that the lost motion, while devastating in its delay, ultimately brought Singleton a more vigorous defense than he ever would have received. Had his appeal proceeded on time, it would have been handled by an appellate lawyer from the same office as his trial counsel, one who was ethically barred from raising ineffective assistance claims and who had indicated he planned to argue only the weakest possible grounds.
“While the interminable motion for new trial phase has not ended well for Defendant,” McBurney wrote, “he and counsel have several more opportunities for review of the many issues they have identified in his case.”
Ripple effects
After the first Singleton hearing in June 2024, McBurney received a letter from another defendant, Robert Ponder, who said his motion for a new trial had also been lost for two decades.
According to the court docket, Ponder was sentenced in Fulton County Superior Court in 2004 on a murder conviction and the same post-conviction attorney who mishandled Singleton’s case was assigned the case in 2005. The court file shows an entry of appearance in May and June of that year, and then nothing else.
McBurney said Ponder’s post-conviction review will start next. He expects it to be a simpler situation since the trial attorney is still alive.
As for other missing post-conviction cases the judge said he has not heard of any others.
”Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, but so far so good," he told the AJC Thursday.
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