“You’ve got all the physical problems – darkness, anger and two big groups of people wanting to fight,” said Annapolis attorney Robert H. Waldman, a former public defender. “It’s very hard to sort out what happened from what people think happened, or what they want to think happened.”
To some, the Jones case sounded simple: a black teenager dies in a melee of about a dozen people, and six young white men are charged.
But experts – none of whom, including Waldman, was involved in the case – said that the more people present during a brawl, the more difficult a case can become.
“It’s a very tough circumstance when you’ve got a number of people involved in a fight and you’re trying to pin the actual murder on one or two people,” said Abraham Dash, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Maryland.
“You have to pretty much base your case on eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence, which is not too helpful if everyone in the fight said they saw something different, and everyone has blood on their shirts.”
One famous example of a case involving a late-night brawl is that of Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis. In 2000, Lewis was charged in Atlanta with murder after the group he was with was involved in a fight with several young men at 4 a.m. The fight, which left two men dead of stab wounds to the heart, took place in an upscale neighborhood still crowded with people streaming from bars after the Super Bowl the day before.
But prosecutors had difficulty presenting credible witnesses who were not involved in the fight and who had a clear view of the fast-moving altercation on the poorly lit street. In the end, Lewis himself became the best witness after he pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of obstruction of justice. But he testified that he never saw the stabbings. His co-defendants were acquitted by the jury.
When multiple defendants are being charged for the same crime, the most common prosecution strategy is to put the most convincing case on trial first. Then, if there is a conviction, the hope is that more will follow.
In the Jones case, this strategy failed, leaving the family and friends of the victim wondering how six men could be charged and none convicted.
But, attorney Richard M. Karceski said, the gap between an indictment, which requires probable cause, and a conviction, which requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, is huge.
“This is terrible for those people who are asking how this could happen,” said Karceski, who has practiced law in the Baltimore area for 35 years. “But those people are assuming that one of the six men is the murderer. Although this may be true, it must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. You may have a strong suspicion who the perpetrator is, but suspicion falls far short of the proof necessary to convict someone in a criminal trial.”
Further complicating the Jones case was the outrage over the death and the sentiment that someone had to be convicted.
“In this case, the public made a judgment – with the best of intentions – about what it believed should take place,” said Carey Deal, a trial lawyer in Towson. “But the courthouse lives by a very different process, one with very different rules and outcomes.”