The killer of Lauren Giddings filed a new appeal last year. Now, a judge has ruled

An appeal filed last May by admitted murderer Stephen Mark McDaniel, the convicted killer of Lauren Giddings, his next-door neighbor and fellow Mercer University law school graduate, has been dismissed by a federal judge on grounds that McDaniel submitted it a year late.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Marc T. Treadwell seemingly ends McDaniel’s long-shot appellate efforts, which have been largely limited by his guilty plea in Giddings’ 2011 slaying and dismemberment at the Coleman Hill-area apartments where McDaniel and Giddings were neighbors.

McDaniel, now 37, is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

As he had in past appeals to state courts, McDaniel claimed his constitutional rights were violated, contending that his lawyers were incompetent and gave him “misadvice,” and that prosecutors intercepted documents prepared for his defense while he was in jail awaiting trial.

In a six-page order last month, Treadwell, the chief federal judge in Macon, said the merits of McDaniel’s claims could not even be considered because he filed them “over a year late.”

Treadwell’s order, citing U.S. Magistrate Judge M. Stephen Hyles’ recommendation in the matter, noted that McDaniel failed to “act with ‘reasonable diligence’” in the wake of a prior appeal that was turned down by the Georgia Supreme Court in late 2020.

McDaniel argued that his appeal would have been timely had the state’s high court not “ignored” his motion for more time, the order said: “Had McDaniel exercised reasonable diligence — rather than blindly assuming the Georgia Supreme Court was [to blame] — he would have realized that his motion ... was untimely.”

Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.