ATLANTA - The path to freedom for a man convicted of sex crimes in Paulding County is paved by a massive misstep at trial: His jury was never sworn in.

Logan Alan Bowman was indicted in February 2014 on nine counts including child molestation and incest. He invoked his right to a speedy trial, and the trial commenced in December. Bowman was convicted on one count each of child molestation and incest.

Later, his legal team discovered that somehow, neither the judge nor the court clerk ever administered the jury oath to the 12-member panel, as required by law.

Hunter J. Rodgers, Bowman’s former public defender, says no one is quite sure how this happened.

“Everything that I’ve seen is that this was just inadvertent, that this was just an oversight--a box that everyone routinely thinks should get checked and is so used to getting checked, it might’ve just slipped through the cracks that way,” Rodgers tells WSB.

Slip or not, the discovery upended the guilty convictions.

“The jury--the body that has been the cornerstone of the American system of law--wasn’t a jury,” Rodgers says. He says he cannot commend the District Attorney’s Office enough for acknowledging the misstep and not trying to get around it.

More than four years after the conviction, the trial court set aside Bowman’s convictions and sentence of 50 years with 15 to serve, noting the failure to administer the jury oath. Then in March 2020, Bowman was freed from prison after winning a motion for discharge and acquittal on speedy trial grounds.

He had served 6.5 years in custody.

The Paulding Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office appealed, arguing that the speedy trial statute didn’t apply in this case, and the Georgia Court of Appeals sided with the State. Bowman’s lawyers took it to the state Supreme Court.

The State wanted the opportunity to re-try Bowman, but his lawyers insisted that would violate the speedy trial demand. The law says if a defendant is not tried when the demand for speedy trial is made or at the next regular court term, the defendant is then acquitted of the charges.

When Rodgers argued the case before justices in September of 2022, he contended prosecutors could not legally get another bite at the Bowman apple because the window for a speedy trial was long expired.

“If they fail to bring your case to trial, you are--the statute says--discharged and acquitted,” he explains. “The state has burned their shot clock and it’s not just the case gets dismissed you are declared innocent, like not guilty as a matter of law.

“Basically, Mr. Bowman wanted the shot clock to get called, and then due to the fact that the 12 people were never, in fact, sworn in as jurors, means that there was not in fact a valid trial, so the shot clock expired,” he explains.

Tuesday, Georgia’s Supreme Court justices sided with Bowman. Chief Justice Michael Boggs authored the majority opinion, noting that jury oath is an “indispensable prerequisite to a legally valid jury trial.”

The opinion went on to say, “Put differently, the administration of the jury oath is what turns the 12 citizens selected to hear a criminal case in to a jury invested with the authority to decide whether the accused is guilty of a crime. Without the oath, there is no jury; and without the jury, there is no trial.”

Rodgers, now an attorney with J. Ryan Brown Law, is no longer a public defender in Paulding County and Bowman’s counsel of record, so he could not contact Bowman with news of his court win.

Rodgers tells WSB the state’s High Court truly lived up to its motto, Fiat justitia ruat caelum (“Let justice be done though the heavens fall”).  He understands that some people will be rankled by the fact that a man indicted and formerly convicted for sexual crimes against a child got to walk free on what some might view as a technicality. Rodgers says that every defendant deserves to have the law equally applied to them without fear or favor, and justices noted they were upholding what had been the law in Georgia for more than 125 years.

“It reemphasized Georgia’s commitment to the rule of law, regardless of outcome, which I appreciate,” says Rogers.

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