EDITOR'S NOTE: This memoir recounts a recent U.S. murder trial. The names of people and places have been changed in the interest of respecting the U.S. justice system and the privacy of the innocent. All other descriptions in this account are a fair attempt to reflect the truth about a harsh reality.
If you take your responsibilities as a U.S. citizen the least bit seriously, serving on a murder trial jury is an experience you will never forget.
The Anystate judiciary had my number, which was called every three years like clockwork. With a little luck and by strategically placing myself at the end of every line that potential jurors stood in, I had managed to be seated in a jury only twice over a span of two decades.
In the first case, I was fresh out of college and had been living in Anystate for a couple of years. A teacher was accused of operating under the influence, second offense. Let's just say for now that the jury could have been accused of incompetence.
The second time I was seated on a jury came two weeks before Christmas in Innercity Superior Court. A teenager had admitted stabbing another teen to death in the street minutes after midnight on New Year's Eve. The now 17-year-old defendant was 15 when he plunged a beat up steak knife into the neck and heart of the 18-year-old stabbing victim. The jury would be asked to decide whether the killing was justified under the law or a crime ranging from involuntary manslaughter to first-degree murder.
Not wanting to sit through a lengthy trial over the holidays any more than anyone else in the building, I thought being a journalist would help keep me off the jury. I couldn't have been more wrong.
I was among nearly 100 potential jurors led into a courtroom that needed a good scraping and new coat of paint. Jury selection began with a brief synopsis of the case to help potential jurors determine whether they had conflicts of interest such as knowing any of the key figures linked to the trial. But on this day, Christmas loomed larger than any conflicts of interest. Many of the potential jurors had travel plans and the judge was dismissing a steady stream of them.
I had a vague recollection of news reports on the killing, and that trump card was in my hand as I approached the judge, two prosecutors and two defense attorneys in the "sidebar" area next to His Honor's stained-wood perch.
Judge, speaking in a hushed tone: "Do you know anyone involved in this case or have any other potential conflict of interest?"
CC: "No."
Judge: "Have you ever heard about this case or do you have any potential bias against anyone involved in this case?"
CC: "I work at a newspaper, and I'm pretty sure I read a story about the case but I don't remember many details."
Judge, leaning forward and whispering: "Can you help us out? This is an important case and we're struggling to seat a jury so close to the holidays."
Memorable moment No. 1: Despite losing much of my youthful idealism many years ago, I'm susceptible to calls to civic duty.
It took a day and a half to seat 15 jurors, only 12 of whom would deliberate the case. As jurors had been selected, we were led one-by-one to the slightly confined jury room down the hall. (Note to potential murder trial jurors: you will spend a lot of time in the jury room with very little to do, and it can become a problem.) Soon after the 15th member of the jury joined us around the big, rectangular, wooden table that dominated the room, a pair of court officers lined us up in the hallway then led us into the courtroom.
With the exception of the judge, they were all there as we took our assigned seats in the jury box. "The Kid" stood at least 6-feet tall behind a table near the center of the room, with the defense attorneys by his side. The prosecutor, clad in a conservative dark blue dress, and the young man from the DA's office who would run around the courtroom with exhibits of evidence smiled at us from behind their centrally located table. The courtroom's gallery, which stretched across the back of the room and under the windows along the wall opposite the jury box, was filled with police officers, witnesses, and loved ones of the defendant and the deceased.
Bailiff: "All rise for the Honorable Justice Stephen Cosgrove!"
After the black-robed judge entered the room and sat down, we were all told to be seated. It was about 2 in the afternoon and the judge said we would be going home early after he gave us some advisories and instructions. He didn't expect the jury would have to be sequestered in a hotel. We weren't allowed to speak about the case to anyone outside the courthouse. We were not allowed to discuss the case with other jurors until deliberations began. He hoped the trial would be over before Christmas but it could last into early January.
Visiting the
scene of the crime
There are some mean streets in Innercity, so I was surprised that the court bailiffs who accompanied the jury to the crime scene on the first full day of the trial were armed with only white wooden staffs out of the 1700s. I was even more surprised when our bus ride from the courthouse to the neighborhood of worn triple-deckers where the stabbing had occurred took only five minutes.
The lead defense attorney was the first one out of the bus on that sunny, brisk December day, and he promptly stepped in a pile of dog crap on the sidewalk. Counsel was right out of central casting: a square-jawed, telegenic face and dressed in sharp overcoat, silk scarf and a wide-brimmed hat.
The judge, next out of the bus, noted the defense attorney's sticky predicament and told jurors hopping onto the sidewalk to "watch out for the dog excrement."
We were in front of the brown triple-decker where The Kid had stormed out of his family's sparsely furnished apartment and charged across the small, scruffy park next to the house for his teenage date with infamy. Once all the jurors had assembled on the sidewalk and attorney James Fellows had scraped the sole of his Italian shoe clean, counsel positioned himself with the park to his back and The Kid's house on his left.
Fellows lifted up his black-leather-gloved left hand and pointed down the street: "Look down to the end of the block, where the stop sign is. You'll see there's a little bar down there on the right."
It could have been any street in Innercity. The sidewalk we were standing on ran all the way to the intersection Fellows had pointed out, with two houses next to The Kid's, then a couple of vacant lots followed by more triple-deckers to the end of the street. The opposite side of the street had the bar, a Laundromat, a couple of houses then a small wooded area sprinkled with tires and old appliances that came up to where our bus was parked.
Judge: "Now please step down here a few feet in front of the park."
Led by the bailiffs and their white staffs, we shuffled in the opposite direction of where our attention had first been directed, and stopped at the center of the waist-high chain-link fence that enclosed all sides of the park next to The Kid's house.
Prosecutor Jennifer Kane, protected from the cold in her black overcoat but with inch-high-heeled shoes that couldn't have kept her toes warm: "Before we go into the park, note the distance from this entryway opening in the fence to the other side of the park and Langdon Street."
It was about 120 feet to Langdon, which had a sidewalk running along the park's chain-link fence and three triple-deckers facing into the park from the other side of the street.
As the jury and the court officers walked into the park, we were told to look at key features: the pair of two-foot-high concrete benches that lined the park's single strip of asphalt sidewalk, which gently winded from The Kid's street to Langdon Street; the two lamp posts in the park, only one of which was in working order; and the open gap in the fence along Langdon Street that served as the entryway to that side of the park.
The bailiffs stepped through the Langdon Street entryway. One bailiff turned to the right and stationed himself in front of the triple-decker on that end of the park; another bailiff took a left and stationed himself in front of the triple-decker on that end of the park; and the third bailiff ascended the first step of the triple-decker in the middle, the last steps 18-year-old Anthony Perez ever descended.
The prosecutor pointed out a Langdon Street manhole cover in front of the middle house. It could have been any chunk of cracked blacktop in Innercity.
Kane, pointing first to the manhole then to a nearby section of the sidewalk that edged the park: "This is where Anthony Perez was found stabbed and a bloody knife was found 10 feet away on the sidewalk."
The prosecution’s narrative
The day the prosecution began presenting its case was most remarkable for what happened just outside the courtroom doors.
Jennifer Kane was only about 30 minutes into entering several photographs and maps into evidence when shouting could be heard behind the main gallery area and set of double oak doors that opened directly across the courtroom from where the judge sat. Two of the four bailiffs in the courtroom rushed through those doors, and Kane paused, waiting for a cue from the judge.
The jurors were never told about the fisticuffs in the hallway between partisans in The Kid's murder trial. But the judge sequestered us to the jury room from that point forward whenever we were in the courthouse, so we had a pretty good idea of what had happened. I'm not sure about the other jurors, but I took the incident as a reminder of the mess I was in, the potential for violence among the people who were gathering in the courtroom gallery every day, and the high stakes for justice playing out before our eyes.
The prosecutor's theory explaining Anthony Perez's killing was fairly simple.
According to Kane:
- On New Year's Eve day, The Kid got into a fight in front of his triple-decker around 6 p.m., when his 13-year-old sister claimed a teen boy had followed her down the street from the Laundromat talking shit.
- Defeated, The Kid went back into his family's apartment to salve his wounded pride with liquor.
- Around 11 p.m., his sister went to a party at the middle triple-decker across the park.
- When she came back to the family's apartment soon after midnight complaining about being tossed from the party, The Kid grabbed the steak knife the family used to work the lock on the apartment's front door and ran across the park.
- On Langdon Street, The Kid confronted Anthony Perez, who was related to the people who had hosted the party, in the crowd that had poured onto the street after midnight.
- One combatant had brought a knife to a fist fight and soon a mortally wounded Perez was in a pool of blood on Langdon Street's frigid asphalt.
The prosecution began presenting its case with a parade of gruesome exhibits, starting with a coroner's line drawing of the upper half of Perez's body showing all nine locations where the 18-year-old had been stabbed. One of Kane's justifications for a first-degree murder conviction was that the killing had been committed with "extreme cruelty."
Compared to what the defense had in store, the prosecution's stable of witnesses was small but hard-hitting.
The witness stand was attached to the judge's perch and only about 6 or 7 feet away from the nearest juror. A technician from the state crime lab was first in the dock and explained the knife wounds, noting which among them were defensive, survivable, fatal. Perez had at least two defensive wounds on his arms; either the stab wound to the neck or the one to the heart probably would have killed him within minutes, the crime lab tech said.
Other than calling one of Perez's relatives who had hosted the New Year's Eve party, the rest of Kane's witnesses were police officers and detectives. One of the sergeants who testified had been at the front desk in the police station when The Kid turned himself in a couple weeks after the stabbing. The sergeant said the teen bellied up to the counter then pointed to a poster on the wall and said, "I'm the one you're looking for."
Defense presents ghetto opera
Doubt was defense attorney James Fellows' best hope.
As one of the jurors would soon point out just minutes into deliberations, his client was "guilty of something" in Anthony Perez's killing. Fellows knew the prosecution was seeking a first-degree murder conviction. If found guilty, The Kid would begin and end his adulthood in prison.
Although the jury wouldn't hear or see anything substantive from The Kid until the day it rendered a verdict, the defense called about 20 witnesses to the stand, including several of the defendant's family members and friends as well as a forensic psychologist the court had commissioned to evaluate the teen killer. Fellows' presentation to the jury wasn't anything like the one the prosecution had made. He would not try to convince jurors to believe a particular narrative describing the events leading up to Perez's killing. He would try to convince the jury that the fatal stabbing was nothing more than another shocking act of a ghetto opera booked for a never-ending run on the streets of Innercity.
Fellows sowed the seeds of doubt wherever he thought they would take hold.
He introduced into evidence photos of two knives that police found in the park after the stabbing.
He called a witness who claimed someone had pulled up in an SUV or mini-van then then brandished a small-caliber handgun as the rowdy New Year's Eve party crowd filled the section of Langdon Street near the park minutes before The Kid and Perez started exchanging blows.
Over Jennifer Kane's strenuous objections, the dashing defense attorney entered an earlier teenage homicide into the mix. About a year before Perez took his last breath, The Kid's sister was hanging out in a vacant home with friends and frenemies when someone pulled a small-caliber handgun. Within seconds, one of the teens was on the floor with a bullet in his head.
When Fellows called The Kid's sister, Shameka, to the witness stand, she was asked to describe the shooting and what she had told investigators. Shameka swore she wasn't a snitch but admitted talking with the police. She said the shooting victim's friends, including Anthony Perez, had targeted her for retaliation over working with the detectives. Shameka described a fight that broke out over the shooting when she was at a pal's house, as well as gunshots fired at her home that prompted the family to move to the brown triple-decker the jury had visited on the first day of the trial.
Fellows also called the teen who fought with The Kid about six hours before Perez was stabbed.
Fellows: "You followed Shameka down from the Laundromat that night. What did you say to her?"
Sammy, slouching low in the witness stand so all you could see was his face: "It was New Year's Eve, and me and a couple buddies were walking down the street to a party. She started it."
Fellows: "Started what?"
Sammy: "She pushed by me when we were down by the Laundromat, then gave me this look, like it was my fault."
Fellows: "Did you and Shameka talk as you walked down the street?"
Sammy: "Yeah, she said some stuff. I said some stuff. Then we got down in front of her house and she started yelling up to the second floor for her big brother to come out."
Fellows: "Then what happened?"
Sammy: "The Kid came out, got in my face, and I punched him in the head. He went down but there were a bunch of people on the sidewalk, so I took off into the bushes across the street before I could get jumped."
For several days, Fellows called witness after witness to establish what everyone in the courtroom already knew: Innercity isn't where any parent would choose to raise their kids.
Fellows wrapped up his presentation with witnesses and testimony about his client's shattered psyche and horrific childhood.
The Kid's mother described a boy who was an alcoholic by the time he was 13. His father, an African immigrant, had beaten The Kid and other family members so many times that his mother finally had him deported. She said her son had struggled in school for years and had to be placed in a facility for troubled youths after he finished elementary school.
The forensic psychologist who testified for the defense, Dr. Allen Kimble, ran through the litany of The Kid's developmental, social, and psychological defects. Dr. Kimble confirmed The Kid was an alcoholic, said the defendant probably suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder linked to the beatings at the hands of his father, documented the teen's trouble in school, and explained that many psychologists would consider the teen's 79 I.Q. rating as close to the cutoff point for mental retardation.
Kane's cross examination of Dr. Kimble focused on how much the forensic psychologist was being paid for his work with The Kid.
Whether it hit a nerve with Fellows because he was working the case pro bono, or whether the defense attorney just saw an opportunity to score points with the jury, Fellows kept Dr. Kimble on the stand after Kane's questioning.
Walking slowly and deliberately toward the jury box, Fellows asked the shrink how much he was customarily paid for his services. As Dr. Kimble answered, counsel tried to establish eye contact with every juror, then turned abruptly toward his witness and nearly shouted: "Dr. Kimble, are you a whore?"
The trial was in its ninth day, Christmas and New Year's had come and gone, each court session had been intense and tinged with danger.
As the well-chosen word seemingly echoed in the courtroom, everyone present, with the exception of the judge and the prosecutor, bellowed with laughter or barely contained their smirking faces. For the first time since the trial began, the people seated in the gallery shared an emotion other than hatred or anger, with some literally falling out of their chairs.
Jennifer Kane shot to her feet in an instant.
Kane: "Your Honor! I must..."
Judge Cosgrove, his crimson face contrasting brilliantly with his black robe: "Objection sustained. The jury will disregard the defense attorney's last comment. And Mr. Fellows, you will refrain from using foul language in my courtroom."
Reaching the verdict
Among the marching orders from Judge Cosgrove was a directive, from Day 1 of the trial, that none of the 15 people picked to hear the case could talk about it until a dozen of them were deliberating in the jury room. It was a problem on Day 1, and we had only spent about a half hour in the jury room following the bus ride to The Kid's street.
It shouldn't have surprised anyone.
We were packed on top of each other like sardines in our confined, rectangular
retreat.
I had chatty Thomas sitting next to
me the first time we spent more than an hour locked up on Day 2 of the trial,
and two of the five women on the panel loved to talk. I had memorized a little
speech, and it didn't take long for my cue to deliver it.
Annie: "I don't know how I feel
about the defense lawyer. He seems kinda slick to me."
CC: "I know it's going to be
hard on us, squeezed into this little space, but we really shouldn't talk about
anything related to the trial."
Richard: "The judge was clear
about it."
Susan: "This has the makings of
the worst Christmas ever."
CC: "I bet there isn't a single
one of us who walked into the courthouse yesterday and thought they were going
to walk into this mess two weeks before Christmas."
It was a huge relief that the
opening line unleashed the first outburst of laughter of the trial. Nathan, a
transplant from Iowa seated in one of the corner chairs, flashed a particularly
broad grin from under his bushy moustache.
CC: "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm
an editor at the Southland News and have been a journalist for a dozen years.
We're in a tough situation, one of the toughest I've ever been in, and it's
going to be important for us to pay attention and follow all the rules. I've
covered murders as a reporter and editor, and I served on another jury 20 years
ago. We have to be careful."
The speech generated a solid
majority of affirmatively nodding heads, a flurry of allowable discussion about
The Kid's trial ranging from learning about legal procedures to advice on
parking, and a lot of questions about my first jury.
The next day, I brought in two bags
filled with Christmas decorations, playing cards, a chess set, checkers and a
Monopoly game. We were a pretty tight-knit and well-behaved jury from then on.
The deliberations
For a range of reasons, most of us
wanted to be chosen. Some wanted to see the process through to the end. Others
had said it would be torture to sit with the other alternates in a separate
jury room waiting for a verdict.
I wanted to help decide The Kid's
fate mainly because the experience of serving on my first jury two decades
prior had haunted me. I was determined. This time, there would be no jurors
knitting when they should have been thinking, and there would be no playing loose
with the judge's instructions. Even if it had been a just outcome, the jail
time meted out to the teacher in the OUI case had weighed heavily on my
conscience. I didn't want to bear the burden of a miscarriage of justice in a
murder trial.
Only about 10 people could fit
around the big oak table in the center of the jury room, so the other five who
heard the case had to sit in the more-or-less comfortable handful of chairs in
the back corners of our assigned quarters. In addition to the long delays while
the judge and lawyers haggled over points of evidence and law out of sight of
the jury, none of us were particularly eager to venture out into the
courthouse, so we were grateful to have our own bathroom behind a door next to
the doorless closet where our winter coats hung.
The jury wielded three main tools.
We had an old, loaf-sized cassette
tape recorder with the judge's jury orders, which gave detailed definitions and
nuanced considerations for the varieties of homicide: involuntary manslaughter,
voluntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and first-degree murder.
We had a card-table-sized aerial
photo that showed The Kid's street, the park and Langdon Street.
And we had a pad of butcher paper
that shared the one easel in the room with the aerial photo.
There were three factions in the
jury.
The law-and-order group, which
included Nathan's deep voice and slight drawl, was convinced The Kid had acted
either with extreme cruelty or with malice and aforethought, the definitions of
first-degree murder. Nathan's most memorable comment of the deliberations was
100 percent Midwestern wisdom: "You just can't have people goin' round
killin' people."
I was in the faction that would be
torn between voluntary manslaughter and second-degree murder. A couple of us dug
in our heels on calling the killing extremely cruel. The Kid and Anthony Perez
had exchanged blows until the older teen fell to the cracked blacktop next to
the manhole cover. The Kid threw the blood-stained knife toward the park and it
landed on the sidewalk. Then the blood-stained 15-year-old bolted for the park
and didn't surface again until he surrendered himself in the police station.
Our faction knew a truth about a street fight in Innercity: You kept swinging
until the other guy went down.
The best description for the rest of
the jury was undecided. A couple of these jurors were hard to read because they
would say little in the deliberations, although everybody got their two cents
in before the end of the two-and-a-half day exercise. A couple just wanted to
be convinced they were making the right decision. Richard, a sharp professional
who played a game of chess with me during one of the longer breaks, wanted to
walk through every step of the process so he could understand it the best he
could before making his decision.
One of Judge Cosgrove's key
instructions mandated that if the jury found The Kid guilty of homicide, the
panel had to unanimously agree upon the highest level of the crime, which is
why we started our deliberations focusing on first-degree murder.
Before we did anything, we listened
to the judge's instructions again on the old cassette recorder.
At the end, James, a construction
manager who was one of my factionmates, pressed a thick index finger down on
the stop button, which engaged with a loud "Click."
Within seconds, James was out of his
chair, writing the homicide charges on a sheet of butcher paper, stating flatly
as he worked, "It's pretty clear The Kid is guilty of something."
James had been a take-charge member
of the jury from the early days of the trial. The actual foreman made sure he
stayed engaged enough to play his role, but James was the unofficial ringleader
and taskmaster.
We determined quickly that there
would be no unanimity on extreme cruelty playing a role in the crime. Figuring
out whether we could agree The Kid had killed with malice and aforethought, the
other first-degree murder definition on our plate, took about nine hours.
Malice has to be directed at
someone.
I was among several jurors who had a
hard time believing that a drunk, 15-year-old, mentally challenged, physically
abused boy approached the crowd outside the middle triple-decker on Langdon
Street and targeted Anthony Perez with malice in his heart.
And grabbing a beat-up steak knife
as he rushed out the door rather than a better knife from the kitchen showed
poor planning on The Kid's part.
We didn't even bother holding a vote
on first-degree murder.
It took a few hours, and the
undecideds who needed to be convinced were the hardest to convince, but the
law-and-order faction pressed hard for second-degree murder. They knew a truth
about swinging a knife on the streets of Innercity: During his fight with
Anthony Perez, The Kid knew the other teen was probably going to die.
James: "So we think we can vote
on second-degree murder?"
Scott, the foreman: "I think
we're close enough to try."
James: "So, those in favor of
finding The Kid guilty of second-degree murder, hold up your hands."
Not all at once, but we all reached
for the dusty ceiling.
We still had to face The Kid one
last time and render our verdict, but it felt like a lightning fast conclusion
to what had turned out to be a three-week trial.
The verdict
I was ninth in line and always sat
in the front row of the jury box. As we entered the courtroom, everyone was
standing, eyes fixed on the jury's entrance door, and it was a standing-room
only crowd. Once everyone was seated, the judge asked Scott whether the jury
had reached a verdict.
Scott: "We have Your
Honor."
Judge Cosgrove: "Please hand
the decision document to the court clerk."
The clerk collected the sheet of
paper we had all signed and returned to his desk.
Court clerk: "The jury finds
the defendant guilty of second-degree murder."
I had tried not to look at The Kid for
the entire trial, but at this moment I wanted to catch at least a glimpse of
his reaction.
I'm proud of the courage and dedication of my fellow jurors and all the court officers. But I will never forget my fleeting, searing glance at the ear-to-ear grin on The Kid's face.
I'm proud of the courage and dedication of my fellow jurors and all the court officers. But I will never forget my fleeting, searing glance at the ear-to-ear grin on The Kid's face.
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