Man acquitted of murder in gun deal gone bad

A man who was acquitted of murder talked to Channel 2 investigative reporter Mark Winne about the circumstances surrounding the tragic night when a teen girl lost her life.

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Johnny Lester Boynton III was in jail for almost five years. He kept the faith, but in his human weakness at times he wondered if he would ever walk free again.

That is, until a Henry County jury returned not guilty verdicts for malice murder and more in the 2021 shooting death of 16-year-old Azariah Miller.

“Wish this night never happened. I wish, I’m sorry to the family that this happened,” Johnny Boynton III said. “I just wish it never happened.”

“When I heard not guilty eight times, I knew there was a God,” said his dad, Johnny Boynton Jr. “We prayed every day for my son to be free.”

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His mom Angela Boynton said when she heard not guilty, “I think I made a loud noise in court, I just started crying and thanking the Lord.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation testified during the trial that Johnny Lester Boynton III’s gun could not have killed the victim.

Johnny Boynton III says he went with his cousin, Quinton R. Smith, to buy a shotgun advertised on Instagram. But the two men Smith met with were there to rip him off.

Johnny Boynton III says he saw the shotgun leveled at Smith, and both fired at the car with the two men in it. Miller and two other young women sat in the backseat.

“I’m convinced that she realized at some point that they were involved in a ripoff, and she tried to get them to stop,” said former Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard, Johnny Boynton III’s lawyer.

Johnny Boynton III acknowledges the prosecution maintained in his trial neither of the men selling the gun fired. But he says in court Howard countered with an expert who suggested they did.

Howard says he was not allowed to introduce in the trial that the men who tried to rip off Smith were involved in a similar deal days earlier in Clayton County that ended with Geoffrey Canty, the would-be gun buyer, dead. One was convicted of murder in Clayton County and one pled to a lesser charge there.

“Too many guns, too easy to get a gun,” Johnny Boynton III said.

Records indicate Quinton Smith was convicted of murder in Miller’s death more than two years ago

Records indicate Smith got life plus 45 years, and there’s been a motion for a new trial.

And the man convicted of the murder in Clayton County got life without parole. And also, a Clayton County District Attorney’s Office official says a young woman entered a first offender plea to aggravated assault in connection with what happened to Canty.

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