jwg | Entries tagged with trial

The US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. 639 per 100,000 people or a bit more than 2 million people. For comparison Canada's rate is 107.

It is interesting to think about why people are incarcerated.

- In simple terms: it is punishment for the crime that was committed

- Make the victims feel better - the victims suffer from the crime, make the criminal suffer. an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Surveys of victims show that a majority of them would prefer if the money were spent on rehabilitation of the prisoners.

- Prevention from committing another crime while incarcerated

- Setting an example of what happens when you commit a crime to deter other people from committing similar crimes

- In some states prisons are called Houses of Correction. The idea is to retrain and motivate prisoners to not commit crimes after they are let out. Well, that really works well: prisoners are in crowded conditions among many other people who have committed crimes - that is a bad environment. Not enough - if any - properly trained staff to help rehabiltate them by dealing with health problems and skill improvements is another problem.

The US crime rate is in the middle but some statistics are that about 2/3 get arrested within three years of being let out so it doesn't look there is much correction.

I think in some cases instead of treating the people as criminals where they won't talk because what they say can be used against them time should be spent with them to understand the background of why they did it and create a constructive plan for rehabilitation and working with organizations to change policies and procedures that can help avoid similar crimes.

And finally I complete my entries on this trial.

As a jury we had to piece together the events; the prosecution didn't present a very good timeline or diagram of their theory of exactly what happened (or if they did we couldn't remember). We were able to ask the judge for a recap of some of the testimony and to see some of the exhibits but we couldn't have the transcripts; it would be many months before the court reporter transcribed them.

We started out reviewing the testimony and trying to understand what happened. As time progressed we started dealing one-by-one with the charges against each defendant. Ventry Gordon was the person clearly seen to violently stab at least one of the victims multiple times. It wasn't too difficult to convict him of first degree murder with extreme cruelty and atrocity. Sean Lee was arrested that night wearing Jesse McKie's blood stained jacket and since he was also seen at the stabbing even if it wasn't clear that he did any stabbing, by joint venture he was also found guilty of first degree felony murder - felony because he was wearing the stolen leather jacker. Ron Settles was the van driver who was picked up by the police a bit later with two of the other accused in the van, clearly seen at the scene - our verdict was accessory to the crime.

The harder case was that of Ricardo Parks. He was wearing a light colored jacket (the only person dressed that way) that had spot of blood on it that was identified to be that of a victim. No witness could place him close to the action. Early in this phase of the deliberation, as she had done for each defendant, the foreperson asked for a straw poll to see where we initially stood. The vote was 11-1 for guilty. I was the 1. I explained that I wasn't sure but that we needed to do more work before committing. As we worked through the scenarios and witness testimonies it became clear to everyone that he was quite far away from the other defendants during the stabbings. By our understanding of joint venture and premeditation it seemed that we couldn't pin him with any crime. He was not near, the premeditation if any was spontaneous. It may be true that they were all out to make trouble but there was no evidence that they were out to kill. Since witnesses said that the stabber was waving his knife around ( I don't remember if more than one person was seen with a knife) and then grabbed the jacket from McKie that a spot of blood could have easily landed on his coat. There was blood in lots of places. So we acquitted Ricardo.

After we delivered our verdicts, the judge came into the jury room to meet with us. She thanked us for our hard work and gave us some background. I recall that she said that Sean Lee had a second degree manslaughter charge from a prior crime and Ventry Gordon also had a record of some form. Ricardo Parks had no record. She didn't say it outright but it was pretty clear from what she was saying that she thought we got it right. Of course we'll never know if we did, but it was quite clear that there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. The sentencing was a later hearing where we weren't present and had no part in.

So the end result of the activities on this horrid night was that a lot of lives were ruined. Two young men were dead, two were in prison for life-without-parole (Lazelle Cook whose trial was separate and later) was also convicted of first degree murder and received a life imprisonment sentence. Ron Settles was sentenced to several years in prison and Ricardo Parks was able to finish high school.

Our jury bonded very well (we did spend a huge amount of time together) with few serious conflicts. We did have a reunion at one juror's house that summer.

It was a great experience. It was a lot of responsibility and a lot of work. I am very happy to have been chosen to serve on that jury.

As I mentioned earlier there was a separate trial later for the other defendant. This blog by Dan who was on that Jury describes his experience.

And the families and friends of the victims must live with the ugly memories.

There is a memorial for victims of homicide including Jessie McKie at the Garden of Peace in downtown Boston. The Garden of Peace's location was threatened for a while with the erection of a large Suffolk University Dorm but all plans for that project have recently been dropped. Jesse McKie's parents are local artists - Todd McKie, his father does delightful paintings which I've seen on exhibit at several locations; Judy McKie is a furniture maker and sculptor. I don't know anything about Rigaberto Carrion's family.

And my apologies to anyone if I got some facts or nuances wrong.

Continuing my trial story - I'd remarked previously that we were taken to a movie one afternoon I think it was The Prince of Tides. It turns out that was because the prosecution got permission to bring in an expert witness - who was some form of forensic specialist.

( A digression about this witness )
After a few more witnesses and closing arguments it was about time for deliberation. The judge gave us our instructions which included long explanations of the various degrees of homicide, the meaning of reasonable doubt, deliberate premeditation, and the explanation of joint venture. It was interesting to hear that premeditation could be almost spontaneous right at the scene and didn't require serious prior planning. Later we were given a typed copy of this explanation which was very helpful to us. The judge appointed a foreperson, and pulled a name out of a hat and the 13th juror (recall that the other 3 had been removed) was named as an alternate and prohibited from participating in the deliberation. We saw him in the jury room at break times and at the hotel, but of course we weren't allowed to talk about the case.

During the 5 weeks of testimony we had heard a large amount of witnesses. We had police at the arrests, police investigators, a number of witnesses who had seen the defendants just before and during the crime, some people who had encountered them earlier during the day, several people giving background about the victims, a few character witnesses for the defendants. We were not allowed to take notes so this was a lot to remember and decipher.

Some of the police and other officials gave very good clear testimony, but some of the others were pretty fuzzy. Interestingly enough several years later I met the new Cambridge Police Commissioner at a meeting soon after he had gotten started. One of the things I remember him saying was that when he arrived there was one computer available for officers to use in the department and not even many typewriters and the process for their recording notes was pretty weak.

The judge (Wendy Gershengorn) seemed very fair and skilled at her job. At various times she would explain things that had happened in the court to the juror which was extremely helpful to us. She didn't have an easy time because of the presence of four defendants each with his own attorney.

Several weeks ago there was an article in the Globe about jury duty; it asked for people to write in about their experiences. I wrote a letter that said that my jury duty experiences were fine but my last call to duty was pretty poor with two notices in 2 days, 2 weeks notice, a web site for rescheduling that was under construction and an always busy phone number. It was published on Nov 12.

Most amazing was that I received a letter from a Jury commissioner yesterday saying that she had read my letter and apologized for the inconvenience. She explained that this was an exceptional situation. They had expected to seat a jury for a potentially long civil trial on my call day and they sent last minute notices to a large amount of people to make sure they had enough potential jurors. As a result they got an abnormally large amount of telephone calls that overwhelmed their system. The described broken website was due to the fact that they had a year's supply of the notice cards printed and the web site wasn't ready for the beginning of the year. I can see from the address that they looked up my address since it wasn't printed in the paper.

Quite surprising that someone took the trouble to do this and give a real explanation instead of a form letter.

To continue my trial story...

One day, about four weeks into the trial, we were waiting in the jury room and one of the jurors was called out to go to the court room. A few minutes later we were all shepherded into the court room and the judge explained that we were going to be sequestered. It seems that one of the jurors was seen talking to the father of one of the accused (I think the stabber) so she was removed from the jury and we now down to 14.

( Sequestration )
We jurors had already spent lots of time together since much of the time during the trial is spent in the jury room while the court is in minor recess or there are conferences with the attorneys, etc. But now we spent much more time with each other. The jury was a pretty good bunch of people - there was one overbearing guy that people didn't like to much but overall everyone got along together quite well.

Shortly before deliberation one of the jurors was heard by a court officer talking to her husband, an attorney, about the case. She was removed from the jury and then we were down to 13 jurors.

( footnotes )

To continue the story about my experience as a juror in 1992 here is what happened that night (from my fuzzy memory of what the witnesses described):

Some time late in the day or early evening of Jan 25 a bunch of guys met up in Mattapan where some of them lived; they were hanging out together and drove here and there in a van owned by one of them (or his father). There was no evidence presented that they were part of a gang, nor that they were on drugs or drinking. At some point that night they drove into Cambridge and were seen to be roaming around the Newtowne Court housing project where at least one witness said one of them had knocked her(his?) hat off.

They encountered Jesse McKie walking along with a friend and accosted him and tried to steal his jacket. A large knife (never found) was then used to stab Jesse a bunch of times. They then attacked Rigoberto Carrion who I believe was walking by and stabbed him, too. Both killings were extremely brutal with multiple stabbings in the chest/abdomen area.

The perps were all black and Jesse was white but there was no evidence introduced that even hinted that this was a racially motivated crime.

Much of this was seen by a resident in one of the apartments overlooking the spot and he called 911. I think while he was doing this he was not looking out the window and that was when the second homicide occurred. There were several other eye witnesses who saw part of these events. I don't recall that anyone saw the whole scene and part of what we the jury had to do was to piece together the events for which a clear scenario had not been presented by the prosecutor - perhaps the result of some of the many sidebars. It wasn't clear if there were two knives or whether the knife had been passed from one person to another and therefore whether more than one person did the stabbing.

Four people were accused of the two homicides and armed robbery, and the fifth (the van driver) was accused of being an accessory. Our trial included only 3 of the four individuals accused of homicide since the fourth was separated I believe because of contested admissibility of some piece of evidence.

In Massachusetts there is the concept of joint-venture which allows several people to be accused of a homicide if they were working together even if only one was the killer. The definition of working together is quite loose. First degree murder is punished by a life sentence without possibility of parole. There are three types of first degree murder - committed with extreme cruelty and atrocity, by deliberate premeditation, and a felony murder - that is if someone is killed even accidentally while committing a felony. Fortunately the judge after explaining all of this as well as what is meant by reasonable doubt and premeditation did give us a written version of her explanation that we could refer to during deliberations.

As I started to describe in this posting I was a juror on a homicide trial in 1992.

When the trial started we were told that we would meet in the mornings only and we could go back to work in the afternoon. I was happy about this since our Applied Research group at Bull was in the middle of the first version of our software inspection system that was built using a U Illinois groupware toolkit and I was the project manager / semi-chief architect.

One of the first things they did was to take us on a bus tour of several locations including the site of the crime. Seeing the site was not new for me. For a good portion of 1970 - 1984 when I was working on Multics with our offices in 575 Technology Square almost every day we went to Newtowne Variety, among other things a sub shop, to get lunch. Our trip was through the middle of the Newtowne Court housing project from Portland Street to Windsor Street and thus we passed the future scene of the crime every day. Later in the trial, one of the witnesses was one of the guys who worked in the sub shop. I don't know why he was included - he didn't see the crime and the store was closed at the time anyway. (Newtowne was the original name of Cambridge in ~1640).

The witnesses were primarily a number of police officers involved in the arrests and subsequent investigations, some experts, and a various neighborhood individuals who had seen part of the crime or who had encountered some of the perps earlier during the day. Since this was a trial of several defendants who each had his own lawyer, there were an excessive number of side-bars as each of them had something to deal with. One of the defense attorneys was Robert George who had made quite a name for himself taking on high-profile cases - he is currently defending Christa Worthington's accused murderer, a big case on Cape Cod.

After about a week and half of the trial the judge said it was going too slow and the lawyers didn't need additional time so we became all-day jurors. One of the sixteen jurors had some personal problems with illness at home; she was excused and we were down to 15.

During this trial, as in many others, we were not allowed to take notes so there was a lot to remember. During deliberation they brought in many exhibits but we couldn't hear earlier testimony since the court steno hadn't transcribed the notes.

Today I spend a few hours at the Middlesex County Courthouse in Cambridge waiting to see if I would be called to a jury. I wasn't (there were two sets of people that were) and most of us went home at 1:30. Since Massachusetts has a one-day/one-trial system that suffices to meet my obligation for a while.

A few years ago I was on the one-trial side of it and today's work prompts me to post about it which I will do in several posts.

Late at night on January 25, 1990, Jesse McKie, a 21 year old young man was walking down Windsor St in Cambridge by the Newtowne Court housing project. He was accosted by a bunch of guys who demanded his leather jacket. They took it from him and then beat him and stabbed him to death. While this was going on, Rigoberto Carrion, a slightly older man, came by (or maybe he was with Jesse) and he too was stabbed and killed.

There were witnesses that weren't too close to be in harm, one of them in his Newtowne Court apartment called 911 and the police and ambulances showed up. It was too late to save Jesse; Rigoberto died a few days later. The police picked up two or three of these guys and brought him to the Central Square police station and jail. Several hours later, a car with driver and passenger were driving the wrong way up a one-way street to the Police station to see what happened to their friends. They were also picked up. The murder weapon was never found.

One of the six became a state's witness and in February of 1992 a homicide trial was about to begin. It was to be a joint trial and four were accused of 1st degree murder, and one was an accessory. One of accused's trial was separated. I was one of the 16 chosen to be on this jury which was forecast to take 4-6 weeks.

(to be continued)