Barner took out his gun, stood up, and walked down the hallway into the living room with Adams following closely behind him. Barner saw Appellant standing by the front door of the apartment looking out and opened fire on Appellant, who ran out the sliding glass door. Barner then rushed back to the bedroom where Lavant was holding two of the women, shouted for everyone to get down, and broke down the door with his shoulder. Lavant had ordered the two women to bend over the bed, pulled one of the women's underwear aside, and placed a condom over his penis. When Barner crashed into the room, Lavant started shooting at him. Barner fired back at Lavant, who fled through a window. Lavant was shot in the face and thigh, and one of the women in the room was hit in the arm and both legs, but she survived. The victims called 911.

Appellant and Lavant both fled towards Lavant's building in the apartment complex. Lavant collapsed in the bushes outside his building, but Appellant continued on to the home of Lavant's neighbor, Renaldo Weekes. Appellant arrived at Weekes's door wearing all black and appearing "shook up" and "nervous." He told Weekes that Lavant had been shot and was lying outside in the bushes, and after Weekes looked out the window and saw Lavant lying there, he called 911. Appellant claimed that Lavant had asked him to meet up at the front of the apartment complex because Lavant was being shot at, and when Appellant got there, he saw Lavant jump out of a window and then he and Lavant both started running.

The police arrived to process the crime scene and began interviewing witnesses. Weekes called officers over to help Lavant, who was taken to the hospital but pronounced dead on arrival. The police found Appellant's cell phone near Lavant's body and property stolen from the victims nearby. Appellant stayed in Weekes's apartment until the police were gone; Weekes then saw Appellant place a black handgun in Lavant's apartment before leaving for his hometown of Cordele, Georgia.

Volokh notes that the court erroneously refers to Barner as a "former Marine" when he was actually on active duty, and he links to a Naval Service Training Command press release from June 2011.  Let me expand on that a bit.

At the time of the crime in 2009, Barner was an enlisted Marine on active duty and attending college in the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program.  The military has some programs where you can go to school full-time while on active duty.  (Of course, they come with hefty service commitments.)  He later switched to the Navy ROTC.  In 2011, as described in the press release, he "was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his actions on May 3, 2009."   The release refers to him as "a new Navy Ensign." 

Apparently the medal was awarded very close in time to his commissioning as a Navy officer.  That's a nice touch.  Commissioning day is a very big day.  It was one of the red-letter days of my life.

So finally back to the criminal case.  Barner's killing of Lavant was, of course, an eminently justifiable homicide.  Homicides hardly get more justified.  Was Hill, Lavant's accomplice, guilty of the murder of Lavant under the felony murder rule? 

The answer would be different in different states, but evidently Georgia takes the hard-line view.  This appears to be so well settled that the opinion spends no time on it.  Volokh notes that the rule was previously different in Georgia but was changed by case law retroactively.  Volokh says, "And because this sort of reversal of precedent can generally be applied retroactively (except when it can't, itself a complicated question), that decision was applied to Hill."  It is a complicated question, and I'm not sure about it here.

Personally, I do not agree with the hard-line view as a matter of policy.  If a perpetrator has been justifiably killed during a crime, there has been no wrongful death, and no one should be prosecuted for murder.  The shooter typically deserves a medal, and he got one in this case.