Last Wednesday, along with eleven of my new randomly selected best friends, I convicted a man of burglary (1st degree), robbery (1st degree), assault (1st degree) and assault (2nd degree) with three deadly weapon enhancements. The process was sobering and fascinating and with all due respect to the system, enjoyable at times. In this post, I’ll tell you about the crime, the trial and my reflections on the process.
The Crime
On a rainy Sunday night in December of 2011, five people in the drug scene robbed and stabbed two women in their trailer, just east of Lake City Way. Four of the five plead guilty and the defendant in our case was the last one caught and the only one to go to trail. We heard testimony from all five. Their roles were planned and executed as follows:
- the planner: a dealer and one-time friend of the victims suggested the target and lead the way
- the driver: a guy who drove for another drug dealer drove the group and waited in the car
- the girl: a 17 year-old girl knocked on the door to trick the women into opening the door
- the stabber: a violent “stick up kid”
- the thief: the defendant in our case, who went into the trailer with the stabber to get the bank bag where they knew money and drugs were kept
The prosecutor framed the situation as if the informer suffered a crisis of conscience about a violent attack on two older women, but I don’t think that was it at all. Even four and half years later, he seemed most upset about their unsanctioned use of his driver. The stabber worked for both him and the planner, so that also might have upset the informer.
Both women had broken ribs and punctured lungs that required chest tubes to remove air from their body cavities. One, who weighed less than a hundred pounds, had a broken cheek and eye socket and a hole through her cheek from being punched with a knife. She also had bleeding in her brain from blunt force trauma. The other was sliced badly inside her mouth and then stabbed in her side, puncturing her lung and narrowly missing other organs. They both were sent to the ICU and spent five days in the hospital. They did not fight back.
The five people stole less than $900 worth of cash and heroin, meaning that each person got about $150 dollars. I’m sure the money lasted them a matter of days.
It was pretty shocking, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, just how often these folks had been arrested. Everyone except for the driver was incarcerated and brought to court in handcuffs. The planner, who seemed far more intelligent than the rest of them, turns out to be a sex offender (unrelated to this crime). He was a 30 year old drug dealer with a meth-addicted 17 year old girlfriend that he involved in robbery. She served her time for this crime, ran away from a drug treatment program and is now back in prison, for committing another robbery with another boyfriend. Coincidentally she robbed the bailiff's daughter’s house and he had to be excused during her testimony. I felt pity for her. The stabber, who admitted to doing this kind of robbery regularly, eventually stabbed a 23 year old man in another robbery and left him to die, so he’s doing about 38 years. He was hostile and clearly not very bright. Even the informer is in prison too, though I don’t know for what.
The main physical evidence was found in the driver’s car, which contained a drop of blood from one of the victims, linking the car to the crime. Also found in the car were a handwritten, post-heist shopping list, listing the perpetrator's names along with the junk food, cigarettes and drinks they each wanted. A time stamped Walgreens receipt showed most of the items from the list. There was also a surveillance video taken from about 20 yards away from the trailer, that clearly showed four people approaching the trailer and leaving at a run. With the dark and distance, there was no way to identify people.
One victim has since passed away, but the one we did hear from said two men came in to the trailer, but she was much more focused on the stabber, who was attacking her and her friend than the second man, demanding the money bag. We were confident that there were five in the group and two men in the trailer.
So the key question was whether or not the defendant was part of the group. All four accomplices said he was. The stabber knew the defendant best and thought he was a witness called by the defense, rather than the state. He said that he wanted to help his friend and tried to do so by saying that he committed all the violence and that the defendant remained outside the trailer.
The driver and the girl (who was doing drugs on the way there) weren’t very clear on the name or identity of the thief, saying that they only met him that night. However, they readily agreed that he was called “Capone”. This nickname was used on the shopping list and corroborated by every other druggy who testified.
Similarly, none of the four really knew the name of the driver, except through legal proceedings after the fact. The planner was also known by a nickname unrelated to his given name.
The defendant testified at the end of the trail. He said he overheard some of the planning, was with his friend (Joy) at the motel they briefly stopped at post-burglary but that he didn’t go with them. He said he was a confidential informant and that they were all out to get him. That was the same reason he said he fled to California in the years since the crime. He explained away the “RIP Capone” tattoo on his forearm, which he already had in 2011, as a testament to his favorite dog. Seriously.
He was not very credible, but his testimony sowed some doubt. With the exception of the planner, the others didn’t seem bright enough for conspiracy. Their stories were very consistent on the larger details. The motives for conspiracy didn’t make sense. The stabber really did seem like he wanted to help the defendant out by lessening his involvement, rather than participating in a complicated ruse to incriminate an innocent person.
In a dramatic twist, another drug friend of the defendants was picked up at 8:30 in the morning on the last day before closing arguments. We’ll call him the last-minute witness. He was part of a couple (Joy’s boyfriend) who rented the motel room the five stopped by after the crime and he had the perfect alibi of having been in jail for a month, being released about two days after the crime. Unlike the other people, this guy had known the defendant pretty well for several years. He said that the defendant had told him that he felt bad about a robbery where two women got hurt and that his role had been to get the money. He also easily corroborated the claim that the defendant was called ‘Capone’ by many people. Later that afternoon this sad character was released back to life of heroin and homelessness.
For many of us in the jury the testimony of this last friend cinched our conviction that the defendant really was Capone and that he really had committed the crime.
The Trial
Unlike the excellent TV show The Good Wife, people in real life are not very well spoken. They start sentences and then reach grammatical dead ends. The prosecutor had the annoying habit of using so many negations that his meaning was lost, like “didn’t you not say that you never…”. In one case he said “It's fair to say you don't remember everything you said in that interview.” The witness said “no” but clearly conveyed the meaning “yes, I don’t remember.”
Eyewitness testimony is full of holes, most of which did not seem critical. A neighbor misremembered which hospital she brought one of the women to. A cop forgot the second bedroom when describing the layout of the small trailer. The victim couldn’t remember how many days she spent in the ICU. Many of the moments that burned through the haze of time and drugs were the moments of violence and fear, which rang true in testimony.
All of the co-conspirators lied and denied like crazy when they were first interviewed. Listening to questioning where the witness repeatedly said, “yeah, I was lying about that and everything else” seemed a little counter productive, like the format of question and answer just didn’t make sense in the context.
As my title says, there were many instances of betrayal. The planner orchestrated an attack on his former friend. The informer jealously turned in friends and acquaintances for actions similar to things I’m pretty sure he himself had done. It also irked me that the planner denied that the girl half his age, who he supplied with drugs and involved in crime was his girlfriend when everyone else referred to them as a couple. In another twist, the defendant actually told part of the truth which was that he had been a confidential informant and had prompted the raid that led to the month-long incarceration of his friend (the last-minute witness). However, neither the friend nor the co-conspirators knew about the defendant’s C.I. activity.
When the electricity for two thirds of downtown Seattle suddenly went out one day, we were listening to a police interview with the planner on the stand in his prison garb. I did feel the guards were a little slow on the uptake. Then later, a large pair of scissors used by a forensic scientist to open up an evidence envelop was left on the witness stand. One of the jurors nervously pointed it out during a break, as it sat inches away from the large, un-handcuffed and similarly incarcerated informer. Oops.
The Jury and Deliberation
The process of voir dire lasted about a day and half. We started with 80 people, split in to two groups because of the capacity of the court room. I had a low number and therefore was in the jury box the whole time. It was a powerful experience where people shared very personal answers to questions about violence and drugs among other things. One man lost a daughter to an overdose. One women’s home was raided by terrorists in Kashmir. Another woman was assaulted by an ex husband.
We talked about credibility, the burden of proof, legalizing drugs and whether people who break the law still deserve the protection of the law. It was riveting. Both lawyers were frustratingly thick-headed about a man from Vietnam who was worried that his English proficiency wasn't good enough for a situation where he couldn't interrupt to clarify unfamiliar words. They kept asking if his vocabulary was large enough to cover a topics they refused to disclose.
There was also a lot of time spent discussing people’s vital importance to their jobs, medical issues and vacation dates over Memorial day weekend. The current jury pay for $10 a day was set in the 1950’s so those earning minimum wage are excluded easily based financial hardship.
Among the fourteen of us selected we represented most major local companies including Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom and Brooks. We worked in education at three levels: elementary, community college and university. We sold second hand goods, lingerie and real estate. We ranged in age from 22 to 3-weeks retired. We all had college degrees.
We did four puzzles over eleven days . Speaking as someone who doesn’t have a table but does have a toddler, this was pretty fun. Walking back into the serious atmosphere of the courtroom after doing a puzzle and pointedly not talking about the case, which was the rule prior to deliberation, was like jumping into icy cold water.
Deliberation took us a day and half. Everyone was remarkably cooperative, respectful and serious. Some people struggled with their desire for a perfect case with fingerprints and more video evidence that would give them absolute certainty. We spent a lot of our time talking about being armed with deadly weapons. We were told that a knife over three inches was a deadly weapon and that a knife under three inches could go either way. The knife was not recovered, so it came down to interpretation of whether a smaller knife had to be used to be considered deadly and what it meant to “easily cause death” or “likely cause death”.
We all struggled with the fact that the stabber’s plea left him without assault charges, while the accomplice laws so clearly meant that our defendant was guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, despite the fact that no one claimed he had even touched a knife.
We were uplifted by decency of our randomly selected neighbors on the jury and the relative merit of our legal system as much as we were brought down by the pathetically tragic world of drugs and addiction.
Here’s an article about the crime: http://m.seattlepi.com/local/article/Prosecutors-Home-invasion-gang-slashed-Seattle-4803394.php
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