NOTA BENE: Referring to Brooke Stringer's lawyer Tangi Carter's address to the jury; "She called into question Benton’s findings, saying he has testified in a lot of cases and “affected a lot of lives.” Benton “has an agenda,” she said and called him a “police officer/doctor.”
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Brooke Stringer, 24, was found not guilty in the death of her daughter, and it was a hung jury in the case against her co-defendant and boyfriend Brandon Gardner, 28, so a mistrial was declared.
It will be up to the Jones County District Attorney’s Office whether to pursue prosecution of Gardner in a retrial.
A Neshoba County jury — made up of six white men, four white women, one black woman and one Choctaw man — deliberated for more than four hours, into early Friday evening.
Judge Dal Williamson had sent them back to the jury room about two hours earlier after they indicated they were deadlocked in their deliberation. The split at that time was reportedly 8-4 in favor of finding Gardner guilty of manslaughter.
“Please continue a while longer,” the judge said, after repeating instructions to jurors to “not surrender your honest opinion” just for the sake of returning a verdict.
When they came back a couple of hours later, jurors had unanimously decided Stringer was not guilty and they were undecided on Gardner.
There were tears and hugs for both defendants from their attorneys, family members and friends after the announcement.
“We’ll be giving our quote to Mississippi Today,” said Jansen Owen, one of three attorneys for Stringer, when he saw a Leader-Call reporter who had covered the trial in its entirety waiting outside the courtroom.
Mississippi Today hasn’t covered any aspect of the case, from the time of Rosalee’s death in October 2019 to Gardner and Stringer being arrested in December 2021 to the trial this month.
Stringer testified in her own defense but Gardner did not take the stand — a decision that jurors were not supposed to hold against him, according to the standard jury instructions the judge read.
Jurors then heard three hours of closing arguments from attorneys on Friday morning and afternoon to wrap up eight days of evidence and testimony, then retired to the jury room just before 2 p.m. on Friday.
They returned the final verdict shortly after 6:15.
“You heard from him seven times” in recorded interviews and body-cam statements, Gardner’s attorney Chris Collins said in closing.
Collins is a Neshoba County attorney and former judge who joined attorney Marcus Evans of Waynesboro after the defendants were granted a change of venue because of pretrial publicity in Jones County.
He encouraged the jurors to listen to those interviews again, and they did listen to at least one.
Gardner and Stringer were charged with capital murder, with felony child abuse as the underlying felony charge, but they could have been convicted of second-degree murder, manslaughter or aiding and abetting in the death of Rosalee.
They were charged more than two years later after an autopsy report from the state crime lab showed that the cause of Rosalee’s death was blunt-force trauma to the head and the manner of death was homicide.
Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty for the defendants.
Collins used the court’s often cited analogy to distinguish between direct and circumstantial evidence — that seeing it rain is direct evidence and seeing water droplets on the coat and umbrella of someone entering the courtroom is circumstantial evidence that it rained — to make a final point.
He said that he placed his sportcoat on the bathroom counter, which set off the sinks’ motion detector and soaked his coat. It was wet, but it hadn’t been raining.
“That’s reasonable doubt,” he said.
Stringer’s attorney Tangi Carter made the same point in her closing just before Collins.
“She was a mother fighting like hell trying to save her daughter,” Carter said of Stringer, referring to 911 calls and early interviews they heard between her client and various officials.
She talked about the grief Stringer has suffered with “every day” and how that’s been compounded by being “wrongly accused of capital murder.”
She continued to talk about the daycare injury Rosalee suffered more than three weeks before the fatal injury and the lack of a full investigation into that incident.
Both incidents were similar, she said, in that the daycare worker heard a noise then heard Rosalee crying before going to check on her — which is the same scenario that Gardner described.
Carter also talked about the co-defendants’ consistent stories and cooperation with investigators, without being accompanied by lawyers, and described that as “like sheep to slaughter.”
She called into question Benton’s findings, saying he has testified in a lot of cases and “affected a lot of lives.” Benton “has an agenda,” she said and called him a “police officer/doctor.”
Carter concluded: “The bottom line is, we don’t know what happened to Rosie. When you don’t know, there’s doubt.”
Prosecutor Kristen challenged the defense’s contention that bruises Rosalee sustained at a daycare more than three weeks earlier didn’t cause the severe head injuries that led to her death.
“Bruises to the face don’t cause a brain bleed,” she said. “The medical evidence is incontrovertible. There’s no other conclusion, ladies and gentleman. Consistency doesn’t equal truth.”
The baby was incapable of creating enough force to cause the fatal injury to her head, Martin said, citing medical and autopsy reports. Both Stringer and Gardner had a few moments alone with the baby in the bedroom on the night the injury happened, she said.
Martin pointed to a statement Stringer made in her interview with Benton hours after Rosalee was airlifted to UMMC.
Stringer asked if shaking or “holding her down hard for just a second” would cause injuries like Rosalee sustained. Martin noted the specificity of that statement and said, “I submit she told you right there what happened.”
Shortly after going tothe jury room, jurors sent a question to the judge asking for a “broader definition of manslaughter,” but he referred them to the definition that was included in the jury instructions.
It was after that they announced they couldn’t reach a decision before going back and returning with the verdict for Stringer and no decision for Gardner.
The split is often a factor that prosecutors use to decide if they will retry a case."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.leader-call.com/news/free_news/split-decision-or-split-in-decision/article_cf8b76c8-0ecb-11ee-b510-8ffb95719ee1.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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