On the Jury--Part I

On Monday and Tuesday of last week, I served on the jury of a criminal trial. It was my first time ever being called in for jury duty, and I got called in for the first trial that day in the Montgomery County Circuit Court. Beginner’s luck, I guess. I’m really glad I got chosen, because it was an extremely enlightening look into the process of justice in my county—haphazard, gray, but in the end as fair as we could possibly muster. We hoped.

There was a parade of eyewitnesses, each with his or her own details to add, own perspective, own biases, and own errors. Read through this account of the incident and of the testimony of the witnesses and the police officers on the scene. You’ll agree, I think, that it would have been a hard case to decide. What would you have done?

The case was a break-in. The defendant, a black kid from south-east DC, was being charged with first-degree burglary of a home in the wealthy Maryland suburb of Olney, and with the theft of goods from that house. There was one thing we knew for sure in the case—that the house was broken into, and things were stolen. The rest, including and especially the involvement of the defendant, was frustratingly ambiguous.


This picture illustrates the neighborhood and the action that occurred during and after the crime. (You'll probably want to click on it to see a larger version.) The house with the red square around it was the one burglarized, belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Jones and their two daughters.

Just after 12pm on St. Patrick’s Day of this year, Mrs. Adams, a part-time nurse, was sitting in a chair at her bedroom window (at house marked by “A”), suffering from back pain. She noticed then a young black male with a backpack riding a bike down the street (red arrow). “That’s odd,” she told the jury she was thinking, “school is in session now—why isn’t he at school?” (“That’s odd,” she didn’t tell the jury she was thinking, “why is there a black kid in our neighborhood?”) She immediately noticed that his height was 5’8”, the same height as her son. She also noticed that the kid rode his bike straight into the gap between the Jones’ house and the Butler’s house (B). Then he came back to the front of the Jones’ house, and rang the doorbell. Then, oddly, he started jumping up and down in front of their windows, waving his arms madly and peering inside the house. There was no response from inside. He walked over to their garage, looked in the garage window panels, and finally went back around the side of the house.

Mrs. Adams immediately called Mrs. Butler, a stay-at-home mom. “Mrs. Butler,” she asked, “do you see a bike parked alongside the Jones’ house? She did. “I think something funny is going on. I’m coming over, let’s watch their house.” From Mrs. Butler’s big picture windows they couldn’t see the back of the Jones’ house. But they strategized that with a vantage point on the other side of the Jones’ house, at the Coons’ house (C), they might be able to catch what was going on. Mrs. Adams called Mr. Adams, who worked from the basement of their house. As he was coming over with his digital camera, they spotted Mrs. Coons, a stay-at-home-mom, carrying her baby out with her to get the mail. Mr. Adams ran over to her and told her to go back inside for safety; something was going on. They both went over to her place and set out to wait on the Coons’ back porch, camera ready.

Then, inside the Butlers’ house, Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Butler heard a loud, rhythmic banging from the back of the Jones’ house. The women called 911 and reported a probable burglary at the Jones. On the 911 tape, the jury heard Mrs. Butler, frantic and trying to be calm, shakily telling the operator what was going on, with Mrs. Adams in the background telling Mrs. Butler to tell the operator the few descriptive details she noticed about the burglar when she saw him on the bike—race, height, that was about it. Minutes passed. Neither the Adams or Mrs. Butler or Mrs. Coons saw anything. Mrs. Butler grew increasingly frustrated on the phone, begging the operator to send the police faster, demanding to know why they weren’t coming.

Then, suddenly, the burglar appeared on the Jones’ back deck, walking down the steps. He looked up, and made eye contact with Mrs. Coons for a second. Mr. Adams was fiddling with his camera at the time, switching between movie mode and still mode once he realized his card is full. He only managed a shot of the sky in his rush to take the picture and never saw the burglar’s face. Mrs. Butler saw the side of the burglar’s face and gave this description to the 911 operator: “He’s got on blue jeans, a gray jacket with navy blue panels down the sleeves, and a black skullcap. Slight build, young African-American man.”

The burglar hopped on the bike, backpack bulging, and took off through the backyard, along the treeline (aqua line). “He’s getting away!” Mrs. Butler wailed to the operator. “You’re just going to let him go!?”

At this point, Mr. Adams, a trained runner, jumped into action, leaping off the Coons’ porch and sprinting after the escaping burglar through the grass. He started to gain on the bike. “You’d better ride faster!” Mr. Adams taunted the burglar. The burglar looked back and saw Mr. Adams’ approaching figure, deciding to leap off the bike and start running on foot (first tick mark). Mr. Adams started to gain more ground on the fleeing burglar. “You’d better run faster!” he jeered. The burglar seemed to agree, dropping the backpack (second tick mark). At that point, the burglar seemed to disappear into thin air.

Mr. Adams looked to the right, a downhill slope into naked trees, and didn’t see anyone. But to the left was the beginning of an abandoned road, partially obscured by a large mound, which he couldn’t see around. (You can see the road, a narrow strip, coming up out of the bottom of the picture just after the end of the aqua line, going north). Afraid of being jumped, Mr. Adams proceeded slowly around the mound. Nothing. Gone. The burglar was nowhere in sight. In capitulation, Mr. Adams turned slowly around and returned to the abandoned backpack and bike, carrying them back to the house.

At that point the police had arrived and the women were giving their statements to the officers who had arrived at the house. Mrs. Coons had had the best view of the burglar, when they had looked each other in the eye. She told the police that he looked a lot like D’Angelo Barksdale from The Wire. He had a very broad face and a medium coloration, she said, with an uneven complexion, as if he had had pockmarks. The police took the bike and backpack as evidence. They also tried to fingerprint the bike and the house, to no avail. Mr. Jones was called and summoned home from his job as a bank manager.

Meanwhile, about 10 minutes after the burglary, the defendant was seen by a cruising police car running out of a nearby cul-de-sac (yellow arrow), drenched through two shirts with sweat, wearing a purple tshirt and jeans. No jacket. His hair, in a buzz cut, was exposed. No hat. He had on very distinctive white and purple shoes, matching his shirt. He was 5’8”, African-American in his late teens or early twenties, and of a fairly light build. The police were on the alert and pulled up behind him, making him stop. He told them his name and where he was from—southeastern D.C., 30 miles away. Then they asked him what he was doing so far from home. He came to see a friend, the defendant stated. The friend wasn’t home, so he was on his way to his girlfriend’s to get a ride home. The police officers asked where the friend and the girlfriend lived, and the defendant indicated this. The location of their houses was not recorded and was subsequently forgotten by the police.

Have you been on the pavement the whole time? asked the police. The defendant indicated in the affirmative. Then how come you’ve got mud all over your shoes? The defendant shut up and stared at the pavement.

He was put in handcuffs by the police and sat down on the curb to wait. The witnesses were driven past the defendant in a squad car. That’s him, said Mrs. Butler. That’s definitely him. In his pockets the police found a pocketknife and two expensive men’s watches.

The defendant was booked later that night.

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Jones were sorting through their goods that were recovered from the backpack. This task was made more difficult by the fact that Mr. Jones had recently inherited a lot of jewelry from his newly-deceased mother and father, and the couple was not intimately familiar with all of the jewelry. The thief had ransacked their living room, where there were the inherited jewelry boxes, recently back from the appraiser’s, as well as a Wii, a Game Boy, and games for each of the game systems. All of this stuff was stolen, and all the contents of the backpack were immediately returned to the Jones’ after it was identified as theirs. The missing Game Boy and the games were not found inside the backpack.

One of the police officers showed up with the watches and pocketknife from the defendant’s pockets. The couple was not able to identify them as theirs. The police took those items as evidence, where they stayed for months, claimed by no one.

Meanwhile, a canine unit arrived. The officer, Mr. Adams, and the dog—a German shepherd named Vlerk*, re-traced the steps of Mr. Adams’ chase. The dog took off running, following the path of the chase. Now, one thing about German shepherds is that they are not bloodhounds. They do not follow a particular scent. They are trained to follow the most recent human scent, along with scents of recently-disturbed vegetation. The dog led them to the abandoned road, just after the point where the backpack had been dropped. At first Vlerk led the officer down to the right on the road, but then he got confused and stopped. The canine officer helped Vlerk re-establish a trail, one that led instead up to the left, past the mound of earth and north on the abandoned road. The dog led them enthusiastically to the first cul-de-sac north along the road. Then he stopped again. No trail was re-established. The officer and the dog poked around some of those houses there, looking for a thrown-away jacket and hat. None were found after a couple minutes. They wandered aimlessly up the abandoned road, across the through street, and north off the map. They didn’t find anything after 20 minutes and so everybody went home.

This is the story we heard at the trial, knit together from the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Butler, Mrs. Coons, two patrol officers, the canine officer, and Mr. Jones. However, there are some additional points I’d like to make about the testimony.

When both Mrs. Butler and Mr. Adams were brought up to the stand, they were asked to describe the defendant as they saw him that day sitting on the curb in handcuffs, detained by the police. They both said that he was a young black man, lighter build, about 5’8”, with cornrows, looking exactly like the defendant in the courtroom. The problem was, as we saw later in the mugshot, he was wearing no cornrows that day. He had grown his hair and braided in the rows only since being in prison awaiting trial.

Another interesting moment came when Mr. Jones finally took the stand, near the end of the second day of the trial. The prosecution lawyer had him look at photos all of the stolen loot found in the backpack, and re-identify everything as his. Then, he brought up the watches found in the defendant’s pockets. “Do you recognize these?” asked the prosecution lawyer. “Yes. Yes, that gold one, that is definitely one I inherited from my father. That is it.” This was the first time he had identified that watch as his in the five-plus months since the burglary had occurred.

We never heard from the defendant.

There is also a geographical note that should be made. Notice on the map the orange line. This line is accentuating a 6’ tall fence that runs all along the left side of the abandoned road as it runs north. The prosecution assumed that this was the general route the burglar had taken. But if the defendant were guilty, look at the route he’d have to take to get from his last-seen position at the end of the chase to the location where he was stopped by the police—he’d have to leap this 6’ tall fence, or he’d have to run all the way north to the end of it, turn back and run south along the other side of it and end up in that other cul-de-sac, and then turn around again and run out of it before being spotted by the police cruiser.

How do you see the evidence in this case? How would you have ruled if you were on its jury? Leave your comments; I’m curious to see how other people view this situation. After a couple days, I’ll write a post about our deliberations and our verdict.




*This is the only name that is not changed in this blog post.

***POSTSCRIPT

one important note on the testimony that I forgot to add. When Mrs. Coons came up to testify, she identified the defendant as also looking like D'Angelo Barksdale, just like the burglar she saw face to face. However, she was hesitant, as she did not notice an unevenness of coloration like she saw on the burglar that day. No pockmarks, either. So she determined she was "75% sure" the defendant was the burglar.