The Boy with the Gun

A True Story About How I Lost My First Murder Trial

His name doesn’t matter, but his age does. The defendant, in this case, was 16 years old and being tried as an adult for second-degree murder. By me. The case was mostly circumstantial, but for one alleged eyewitness. There was a plethora of ballistic evidence and it was quite damning, except for the fact that there was no direct link to the shooter besides this one witness.

There was no question this case was going to trial. The defense was that it wasn’t him. I think the only offer I was authorized to give was eight years and he wasn’t having it. Complicating matters more was the fact that the deceased was a known drug dealer in the neighborhood. Not exactly a sympathetic victim to the jury, which is a bit obtuse since he was killed, but nevertheless a reality.

I had been a prosecutor in Broward County, Florida for about three years at the time this case came across my desk. I had tried every crime in the book for the most part, but not murder. It’s weird when someone hands you a sh*t sandwich and you think to yourself, wow, they must trust me a lot to give me this. But this case was a sh*t sandwich. And this was the job on many days.

She wasn’t easy to get in touch with. My witness liaison had been calling and calling with no luck. We were about two weeks from the trial without an eyewitness to speak of. Or talk to. Until she called back. And they got her to come in and talk to me.

There’s something you have to understand about being a witness in a case, especially when you live in the neighborhood where the crime occurred and know all parties involved. You don’t show up asking, “How can I help you?” And she didn’t. I couldn’t blame her.

I was always good with witnesses and victims when I did the job. I had the ability to relate to them because I listened and didn’t judge them. But she was suspicious (of me). I tried to break the ice over and over, but it was slow going. I couldn’t get much out of her. I was part of the system that was sending half the people she knew to prison.

But she knew who the defendant was and she was sure he was the boy with the gun that day. There wasn’t much else to go over. But it was still two weeks before the trial was to begin.

After the jury was picked and the first day of trial began, I was about 30% confident my main witness would show up. This was a regular occurrence, but in a murder case, it was all that more serious. She hadn’t been responding to our latest check-ins and date reminders. Again, this was not a surprise.

She had been served with a subpoena, so she had to come in theory. Of course, that didn’t mean she had to enjoy it. And she wouldn’t. Neither would I. I presented the entire case before calling her because she was being dodgy. I also felt like it was the only way to end my witnesses. With the only person who actually could identify him as the boy with the gun.

He was called the boy with the gun because it was something the detective kept saying over and over in their questioning of the witness. “Did you know the boy with the gun?” “So, the boy with the gun was someone you knew from the neighborhood?” “What did the boy with the gun look like?”

To this day, I don’t know if the defendant, in this case, was the boy with the gun. The same boy who killed another person. I’ll never know.

She showed up. I was told she was waiting in the hall for me to call her to the stand. I was unlike other prosecutors. I never prepped my witnesses before trial. I told them when we met to always tell the truth to the best of their recollection and they didn’t have to do anything else other than that when they took the stand. So, I had no forewarning of what was about to occur.

I had a flair for the dramatic. And apparently, so did she. I had set up my questioning and my entire case to lead to a finale where she identifies the boy with the gun. The State rests. She talked all about what she saw. She seemed to be remembering everything fairly well.

I wouldn’t say she was combative, but it was quite apparent she would have rather been somewhere else. We got through it. I had established everything I needed to. Time to just put the cherry on top and close the case, which was completely circumstantial up to this point.

Me: Do you see the person you’ve been referring to as the boy with the gun in the courtroom here today?

Her: (ten second pause)

Her: (looks at the defendant and then back at me)

Her: Nope.

You know the feeling when your heart drops out the bottom of your shoes? Think of that feeling and then multiply it by 100 going into a black hole in a dungeon where you could be responsible for setting a killer free. Yup. Welcome to the close of my first murder trial. “Nope.”

I was stunned. The jury could tell. The defense attorney nearly fell out of their seat in celebration. The Judge was wide-eyed. The defendant smirked. I did not. I rested my case.

We still got past motions since I had enough circumstantial evidence that pointed to the defendant indirectly to let the jury decide. And they would. Swiftly. To say I took it on the chin during closing arguments was an understatement. When you get your knees knocked out, you have to deal with it. And I did.

I focused on the evidence. I knew what was coming in response. It wasn’t pretty. I had my last gasp of closing argument, but when I sat down, I knew I was going to lose. And I knew the boy with the gun would be released. If he was even the boy with the gun.

I think the buzzer rang from the jury after about thirty minutes. Not. Good. For. Me. Not guilty. Not surprised.

I walked back to my office, dropped the file in my assistant’s inbox with a not guilty on it and went into my office. Where two hundred other first-degree felonies were waiting for me. And that’s the job in a nutshell. Alleged boy with the gun 1, State 0. Moving on.

When I look back on my career as a prosecutor, there were a lot of days like this. Justice is not a straight line. It’s always crooked in a variety of ways. Sometimes the system works. A lot of the time it doesn’t. Lady Justice weighs things the way she wants to.

But when I left the courtroom that afternoon, I wasn’t even sure that the defendant was the shooter. I was pretty sure, but none of that mattered. It was whether I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the shooter. And I couldn’t. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t fail. I played the hand I was dealt.

I lost my first murder trial. Someone lost their life. And no one seemed to care much about either result. The system just kept moving. And so did I. But I still think about the boy with the gun from time to time.

Since 2002, he has spent 10 years, 1 month, and 28 days in prison for four separate crimes. It doesn’t make me think he was the shooter any more than I did before. Because the system is unrelenting. True justice is elusive. Especially if you are accused of being the boy with the gun when you were 16 years old.

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© Jonathan Greene 2019