A woman who chased down a man after a hit-and-run crash and fatally shot him in 2019 learned her fate Friday morning in front of a packed Clayton County courtroom.
Hannah Renea Payne was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after she was convicted in the killing of 62-year-old Kenneth Herring.
The jury needed less than two hours Tuesday to render its verdict following five days of testimony, finding Payne guilty of felony murder, malice murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. For sentencing purposes, several charges were merged with others or dismissed. Her full sentence was life with parole plus 13 years, Clayton County Superior Court Judge Jewel Scott announced Friday.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Herring’s family had hoped for a sentence of life without parole.
“Knowing that I can’t see him again, I would like her to have the same thing,” Herring’s sister, Jacquelin Herring, told the court. “He got a life sentence that he did not ask for. As I watched her leaving out, and she was crying as she was going through those doors, that’s the same way I felt when they closed that casket on him. That door would never open again. I will never see my brother again. Only through pictures.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
“I no longer have a big brother,” his sister, Vickie Herring, said through tears. “We won’t get to laugh at him because he couldn’t dance, but he tried ... no more Christmases, no more birthdays, no more family gatherings. His grandchildren won’t know him. He has two adult children that don’t have a father anymore.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
On May 7, 2019, Payne saw Herring hit another vehicle near Clark Howell Highway and Ga. 85 and decided to follow him, Clayton police said at the time. She called 911 before chasing him for about a mile to the intersection of Riverdale Road and Forest Parkway.
She then blocked his pickup truck with her Jeep, got out and confronted Herring with her gun in hand, according to officials. Shortly after that, Payne fatally shot Herring, who was unarmed and may have been having a medical episode, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also said Payne, who was 21 at the time, ignored the instructions of 911 dispatchers who told her to stay at the scene of the initial hit-and-run and not to engage the other driver. After the shooting, a witness recorded a video that appeared to show Payne changing her clothes before police arrived.
Parts of the timeline are not clear due to inconsistencies in Payne’s account of what transpired that day, prosecutors have noted.
“She has yet to tell a consistent story about what happened. Every time she told the story in her interview, it changed. It was different here. It was different in the back of the patrol car because she accepts no responsibility for her own actions,” Chief Assistant DA Bonnie Smith told the judge.
Throughout the trial, Payne’s attorney, Matt Tucker, argued that the inconsistencies were in the witness testimony and insisted his client was only trying to help by getting Herring’s tag number. He said when she got out of her car to confront Herring, she simply wanted to tell him to return to the scene of the crash, but there was a struggle over the gun and, according to Payne, Herring shot himself.
Payne took the stand in her own defense during the trial, saying that if she could go back in time to change anything, she would never have tried to help.
“It’s a shame that somebody who has good in her heart is no longer going to want to help anybody because, for lack of a better saying, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” Tucker told the judge Friday as he asked for leniency in sentencing.
Multiple family members and friends also took the stand to ask the judge for mercy on Payne’s behalf, saying that her real character is being a caring, respectful young woman. But the prosecution quickly pushed back to argue for the harsher sentence.
“The real Hannah Payne is the person who said, ‘I’m safe, but he ain’t,’” Smith said. “We do not believe, judge, that this is a case where the minimum sentence is appropriate.”
The trial drew a significant amount of public attention and speculation that racism played a part in the motivation that Payne, a white woman, had in pursuing Herring, a Black man. The prosecution, however, underscored that they did not consider racism a factor in the case, noting that Payne had an African-American boyfriend, which precluded them from considering hate as a motivator.
“We never, ever bought race into this matter ... that was too simple to say that it was Black and white,” District Attorney Tasha Mosley said. “We sat in our office for four years — we were having these discussions and trying to figure out why. Only Hannah Payne knows why she did it ... We will never know because she never really told us the truth on the stand. That story kept changing.”
“We’ve certainly debated ... would we be here if the person behind the wheel of that beat-up truck was me? Or someone that looked like me?” said Smith, who is white. “We don’t know that. We’ve certainly had those conversations, but again ... to make it about race was to simplify it too far.”
Nevertheless, death threats have been lodged against both families, and both had to be escorted out of the courthouse through a back door.
“This is ridiculous that we’re having that type of security in this type of case when justice was served,” Mosley said, adding that law enforcement is investigating the threats.
“These families need time to heal, and you’re not helping them heal by threatening their lives. Nobody gets to heal.”
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