The Attack at the Silk Plant Forest

NAVIGATION

Reasonable Doubts

Called to judge, the people hear different drummers

By Christopher Quinn

JOURNAL REPORTER

WINSTON-SALEM

March 16, 1998

Howell Jackson and James McLaurin heard the same testimony and saw the same evidence. They just couldn't agree on what it meant.

They were jurors in the murder trial of Arthur E. Baldwin in November 1995. And when Jackson, the jury foreman, began deliberations, he already had a one-word answer to the question before him: guilty. "Of course, the evidence was overwhelming," said Jackson, who is white.

But McLaurin, who is black, had his doubts. "This young man was railroaded," he said.

In the end, eight whites voted to convict. Three blacks and a white voted to acquit. The jury hung, and Baldwin got a new trial.

The Baldwin trial wasn't a high-profile case, like O.J. Simpson, or, closer to home, Darryl Hunt. The defendant was a 16-year-old black runaway; the victim, a former topless dancer. It attracted little attention and only a few headlines. But it shows how race enters our judicial system, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly.

Blacks and whites can live in separate neighborhoods and go to different churches. They can avoid each other in public. But they lose that luxury when a notice to appear for jury duty arrives in the mail.

It works like this: Attorneys pick 12 jurors out of a pool of citizens and put them together in the jury box. Jurors hear the evidence. Then a judge orders them to sit around a table and talk and come to a conclusion.

Most juries don't split, and not all splits are along racial lines. Some experts say that the importance and impact of racially split juries is overblown by the media. They note that conviction rates have climbed in the past 40 years, during a time when juries have become more diverse.

But racial splits do happen and they get noticed in big trials. They raise questions about the fairness of our justice system and can serve as a reminder of the different ways that whites and blacks feel about the justice system and each other.

Walter C. Farrell Jr., an expert on jury decisions, said: "When people of color, who have been denied participation on a consistent basis in major decisions in the country all of a sudden have a chance to participate, they are not going to participate through your world view. They are going to participate through their world view."

Witnesses, a confession

Jackson thought that Baldwin's case was a slam dunk. There was testimony from eyewitnesses and a co-defendant as well as a 38-page statement that Baldwin gave to police in which he confessed to accidentally shooting Debbie Burnette in a botched robbery.

Baldwin's attorney argued that the young man was coerced by police into confessing. They said that he picked up details of the murder from their questioning and after hours of interrogation finally fed them back what they wanted to hear.

Jackson thought it impossible to pick up details from the police and then "confess" it back. He thought that the detectives in the case, one black and one white, conducted themselves impeccably.

Race was never openly discussed among jurors, but Jackson said he knew that it was there, under the surface. When he and the other jurors entered the jury room, a black female juror said that the prosecution had no evidence other than the purported confession. "I knew then we had a problem," he said.

McLaurin said that race came out in the way some white jurors thought about whether to believe the testimony of Baldwin's white girlfriend. The girl, her sister and mother testified that Baldwin was with her the night of the shooting.

"People in the jury room were saying that the white girls were tramps because one was sleeping with Baldwin, and uneducated and all of those things that white people say when white women go with black guys," he said.

He believed that police coerced the confession. Baldwin was a young kid, and the police interrogated him for hours without an attorney or parent, said McLaurin.

"There was reasonable doubt. So I stayed where I was," McLaurin said

Lack of trust in the police

Farrell has studied jury decisions in his work on urban issues at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and as a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other universities.

Because of the history of unfair enforcement of laws, many blacks are less likely to trust law-enforcement completely or trust police to tell the truth, Farrell said. That can create conflicts with white jurors, who have fewer negative experiences with the justice system and are often unwilling to question white authorities that run the system, he said.

Farrell grew up in Raleigh in the 1950s. He said that when he was about 10, his mother told him about two black teen-agers who were tried for rape because they flirted openly with white girls.

"I clearly remember my mother sitting me down and explaining that you can't play with white children, especially white females," Farrell said.

He also remembers when laws did not apply equally to blacks and when blacks were not allowed to serve on juries.

Though the 1868 North Carolina Constitution prohibited discrimination by race, Jim Crow laws allowed whites to effectively shut blacks out of jury service. A law that stood from 1806 to 1947 said that jurors had to be "of good moral character and of sufficient intelligence."

Thomas H. Thornburg, a lawyer and staff member at the North Carolina Institute of Government, said that until 1947 state law also said that jurors had to be property owners. "Of course, women and blacks would have been under-represented in that group," Thornburg said. Later, jurors had to be physically and mentally competent and understand English.

In 1967, state law added registered voters to the jury list. Since 1981 in North Carolina, potential jurors' names have been culled from voter registration lists and driver's license holders. Blacks make up 24 percent of the jury pool in Forsyth County, according to DMV records. That's about the same percentage of the black population as in the county as a whole.

All-white juries not unusual

But getting called for jury duty is only half the story. Potential jurors also have to get seated, and it's not unusual in Forsyth County for criminal trials to be heard by all-white juries.

That was the case at Arthur Baldwin's second trial, in December 1995. This time he was convicted.

Clark Fischer, Baldwin's attorney, said: "I thought a mixed jury would be more receptive to the argument that the police coerced the confession, which was the whole defense. I do think members of minorities often view the police, in a general light, a little more skeptically. So it was important to get a mixed jury. Then, of course, in the second trial we didn't."

Prosecutors can use a variety of reasons to exclude jurors. Race can't be used, although it indirectly comes into play. For example, blacks are less likely to be chosen to serve on capital cases because they often oppose the death penalty.

District Attorney Tom Keith said that much of what determines how a juror might vote is based on factors other than race. Prosecutors look during the jury selection for people with stakes in the system, those who have long histories in the community and conservative values, he said.

He pointed out that juries that imposed the death penalty in the last two murder trials, those of Errol Duke Moses and Alfred "Heavy" Rivera in 1997, had black members. There were two blacks on Moses' jury. Rivera's jury included three blacks and one Hispanic.

And sometimes juries split in unpredictable ways. In December, Kalvin Michael Smith, a black man, was tried for beating Jill Marker, a white woman, nearly to death during a robbery. The beating left Marker unable to speak or walk.

The jury deliberated for a day before sending out a message that it was stuck. Two of the 12 jurors would not vote to convict Smith.

The media, bailiffs, lawyers and court watchers started a guessing game about which jurors were holding out. The two blacks on the jury were the focus of guesses. It turned out later that two whites were the holdouts, although two days later the jury convicted Smith of assault and robbery.

Reaching beyond the evidence

Robert P. Mosteller, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, said that juries can be polarized if members come to see the case as symbolic of racial issues and real or perceived injustices. That is especially true in cases that become nationally or regionally known, he said. Jurors move beyond the evidence in the courtroom to make decisions to convict or acquit based on race and other issues.

Jurors may begin to consider how they are going to answer questions from friends and family about how they voted on a case.

"It is a difficult thing for our jury system to deal with because we are expecting private citizens to go in do the right thing and not really worry about the repercussions when they come back out."

He said, "It's hard to keep it pristine."

Keith said that closing jurors into a room doesn't close them off from outside influences.

In 1992, Ricky Knight, a white man, stabbed Carlos Stoner, a black man, to death. Knight and three others dumped the body in a city park, and Knight later returned to the park to stab Stoner again, cut off his penis and mutilate his body. He called Stoner a nigger when police questioned him about the killing.

In that charged atmosphere, a jury convicted Knight but hung 11-1 for the death penalty. The holdout was a white man, who seemed to be reacting to an earlier case of black-on-white crime. When his fellow jurors asked him who deserved the death penalty if not Knight, the holdout said Darryl Hunt, who was convicted and sent to prison for the murder of a white woman. Jurors reported his statement in a newspaper article after the trial.

Keith said he believes that the racial overtones affected juries after the Knight trial. Prosecutors failed to win a death penalty in the next five cases they tried. Three of the defendants were black.

It wasn't until 18 months later, in 1993, that a jury returned a death verdict for Robbie James Lyons, a black man with a long criminal record who shot and killed a store owner during a robbery.

Keith thinks that the community has gotten over the racial overtones in trials and that blacks will convict as surely as whites.

Neil Vidmar, who is white, teaches social science at the Duke University School of Law and has written two books on juries. He says that anecdotal evidence about race dividing juries gets repeated and focused on by the media until people think such actions are business as usual. His research shows that such cases are the exceptions.

He helped conduct a study in 1997 on conviction rates. It shows that overall conviction rates since 1945 in five states, including North Carolina, and in the federal courts have risen. The study did not look at the racial makeup of juries that acquitted, but Vidmar said he believes he can draw conclusions from the overall conviction rates.

"I think that means that broad-based claims about race and conflict on the jury are probably unjustified," he said.

Not that it doesn't happen, he said.

"We don't want to turn a blind eye to these matters, but what I do want is to caution people against turning to anecdotes rather than some kind of firm data," Vidmar said.

Fischer, the defense attorney, said he doesn't believe that blacks are more likely to be pro-defense. "But race is a factor when picking a jury. As a defense attorney, I try to get a broad cross-section of people. I try to get people from all avenues, and race is one aspect of it. If you get some diversity, it is more likely that people will consider the full range of possibilities."

He'll get a third trial

Arthur Baldwin's day in court hasn't ended. This past November, the N.C. Supreme Court granted him a new trial, his third. Its ruling cuts to the heart of why blacks and whites often approach the judicial system and jury duty from different perspectives. When Baldwin was being questioned, Detective R.L. Barren told him that police had Baldwin's fingerprints and an eyewitness. At the time, police had neither; Barren had bluffed a scared teen-ager. Baldwin then gave his confession.

It turned out that Barren had pulled a similar bluff in a murder investigation two years before. Fischer wanted to ask the detective about that action, but Judge William Z. Wood Jr. wouldn't allow it. The high court said that error entitled Baldwin to a new trial, which will be this year.

But even this plot line has a twist that underscores how tough it is to predict the interplay of race and the judicial system. The detective who bluffed Baldwin is black.

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