Jury selection, sensitivity, justice, and ethics in law

State vs. Stennett Case

This article in The Baltimore Sun serves as an outlet for many of the jurors involved in the "State vs. Stennett" case to speak out regarding what they feel are inaccurate accusations regarding their acquittal of 17-year-old Eric Stennett. April 20, 2000 was a night that many police officers will never forget, but it was also a night that saw the tampering of evidence, the mishandling of evidence, as well as the confusion among the police officers who were there regarding what had actually happened. Police procedure was forgotten, and that is just the beginning of the prosecutions problems when it came to building a solid case against their defendant. All the defense had to do was produce some reasonable doubt, which the jurors obviously felt the defense had done its job.

It would seem that there is no disputing the fact that Eric Stennett was driving the tan Bronco that rammed police officer Kevon Gavin's cruiser at around 90 M.P.H. Stennett was pulled from the vehicle shortly after the crash occurred. Stennett was involved in a high-speed chase that proceeded the supposed attempted shooting of another individual, Antonio Dorsey.

Seems like a pretty easy case to try and get a conviction - after all, there were four police officers that witnessed the events almost in their entirety. There is a gun that matches the casings left at the shooting. Stennett was driving the Bronco. How did he get acquitted?

A large part of the jury was already predisposition to favor the defense. African-Americans made up over half of the jury (10 out of the 12), and African-Americans are less likely to convict someone if there is any hint of police brutality or abuse. African-Americans, especially after the many publicized incidences of wrongful detainment, unnecessary force, etc., tend to mistrust police. Immediately, ten of the members of the jury would be overly sensitive to the actions of the police - if there was any hint of conspiracy, cover-up or just plain lying, these jury members would most likely catch it, and act upon it.

Nine of the jury members were women, which sometimes isn't a factor at all in a case. This one, however, included a minor defendant who was refused any access to his family or a lawyer while he was being held in police custody. He had a concussion and a possible skull fracture, which caused him to take three days before he could be questioned by police. Those three days his mother and a lawyer hired by her were not given any time with him. How could women, especially mothers, on the jury not feel like the police were trying to sandbag the defendant? The poor excuse given was that the police didn't have to inform him that his mother had hired him a lawyer, and that he had never requested one. The jury didn't buy it.

The entire jury only had one white person on it, a white male. The other two men were Hispanic and black, along with the nine black women jurors. Both the defense and the prosecution have a say in the jury selection, therefore the jury selection process must have been fair. There is no way that the defense could be held responsible for "stacking a jury" against Stennett - both sides had their chances to make the jury as close to fair as they could. That, and the judge had no qualms about the jury selection process, either.

As stated before, some members of the jury came into the trial with predispositions that were in favor of the defendant. But both sides were able to present their evidence, and by all accounts the evidence is what harmed the prosecution the most. The police reports from the four witnessing officers were in contradiction of one another. Their testimonies were the same contradictions as their reports. One officer filed a report that said the Bronco seemed to lose control before it hit the police cruiser. Several days later, the officer changed his mind, and resubmitted an entirely different police report. A cop at the scene picked up the gun in question with no gloves on. There was talk of a bandanna or scarf that the defendant was wearing - yet no one could find it, or find any mention of it in several police reports. An officer picked up the shell casings at the scene of the shooting without marking the casing location for photographers. When he returned to mark the areas from memory, he marked ten areas for only nine casings. Stennett was wearing a bulletproof vest that night, but a police officer pulled it off of him before there was ever any photographic evidence that he was wearing it. The patrol car involved in the crash was impounded and sold (with evidence still in it) for scraps.

The discrepancies kept mounting, and the hints of doubt came into the minds of many of the jurors. The testimonies of the police officers were not spectacular, and more than anything just reiterated to the skeptical jurors that the police had much more on their minds that night than following police procedure.

Then there was the question of whether or not Stennett actually did mean to hit the patrol car, or if he couldn't avoid it. The latter of the two makes the death a horrible accident, and nothing more. Sure, Stennett was speeding, but so were the officers. The officers who were chasing him were in an unmarked police car. It is impossible to know if the police officers used their sirens or not, and if the defendant knew that the police were chasing him, or perhaps thought the drug dealer he had just tried to shoot was chasing him. He was scared, to say the least - even the white male juror felt that way.

Some of the physical evidence in the case wasn't even for this case. For example, there was a tire mark on the street, which a prosecution witness testified meant that Stennett sped up even after hitting Gavin's car. Later, after Stennett's defense hired an independent investigator, the witness agreed that the tire mark didn't match the Bronco and that the Bronco's throttle was damaged so much that speeding up was probably impossible.