Case Highlight: Exposing a False Robbery Claim, an Innocent Man Freed. Our client faced serious robbery charges based solely on one woman’s uncorroborated accusation. The prosecution pushed for convictions on nothing more than an implausible story, but the facts told a different story. Key evidence, including lack of motive, contradictions in her testimony, and the physical evidence, flatly contradicted her claims. The jury carefully weighed the inconsistencies, relied on common sense, and delivered a unanimous not guilty verdict, fully clearing him of all charges.

 

[The defendant] has been waiting a long time now for this day. It's been about ten months that he's had this guillotine hanging over his head, wondering every day if he's going to be convicted of a crime that he didn't commit. I told you at the beginning of this case, really any time the prosecution brings a criminal charge, they're making a promise to you, and they're making you a promise that they've got good evidence, evidence that is overwhelming and irrefutable, that's going to leave you in a state of certainty as to what occurred. And have they presented evidence to you like that in this case? Absolutely not. Their evidence has come and has gone, and it's failed completely, face-plant.

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And why has it failed? I'll -- I'll get into the evidence in -- in just a second. I did want to touch on something you didn't hear. You didn't hear from [the defendant]. And I know you're going to get an instruction that says you can't consider that, but I've talked to enough jurors over the years to know that that's sometimes a hard thing not to consider, and so I did want to comment on that. You know, the framers of this country thought it was an important enough right, we put it in the Constitution that you cannot be compelled to testify in a criminal trial. So they obviously thought it was pretty important. And it's important for a very good reason. It's important for cases just like this one, where somebody has absolutely nothing to gain. If he testifies, it's spun as he's trying to save his own skin. And why should he testify, quite frankly, in this case when the evidence against him has been -- has failed so thoroughly and so completely?

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I told you at the outset of this case that there wouldn't be a shred of cold, hard, objective evidence, cold, hard facts to support [the complaining witness's] version of what went down, and I was proven absolutely correct on that point. There's nothing. Absolutely not one shred, not one piece of real evidence that supports her story. And, in fact, to the extent there's been anything put forward, it contradicts her story. This is obviously a scenario where it rises or falls, all the charges, on her credibility, and common sense really was the key phrase we heard. If there's one thing in the jury instructions that's important, it's use your common sense, because if you use your common sense, I think that the -- the outcome in this case really is pretty obvious.

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Any time you have one person like [the complaining witness], raising the finger of accusation -- and that's all this is; it's one person pointing the finger of accusation -- it's important to evaluate and see, are there any facts that support her story? Because we all know people, they have biases. People lie. Facts don't lie, right? And so that's where the proper focus is on in a criminal case. It's not on trying to look at a witness and read tea leaves and try to mind-read and divine, is this person telling me the truth on her seventh, whatever, version of the story, right? The truth is, as human beings, we're not great lie detectors. It's hard to look at a person and know whether they're telling the truth or not. I think she's about the worst witness I've ever seen, but that notwithstanding, the focus should be on facts.

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What are the facts that we know in this case? Fact number one: There's been no evidence whatsoever put forward, not -- again, nothing on a motive. No coherent theory of motive at all. All right. So if you were to accept their version of this case, [the defendant], he's on the gravy train, getting all this money from his mistress. She's given him, give or take, $6,000. Maybe less, maybe more. And then he decided out of the blue in the middle of a pleasant conversation, I'm going to hold her up at gunpoint and then an hour later stroll into the BP so I can get two cartons of cigarettes. I'm going to cut off the gravy train so I can rob her at gunpoint for no apparent reason so I can get two cartons of cigarettes. Ask yourself, does that make any sense? No, it doesn't make any sense. Just food for thought, I thought another interesting thing was that he was buying the Marlboro Lights, but then he was also buying the cigarettes that weren't his cigarettes. And wasn't it interesting, [the complaining witness's] testimony, that she herself is a smoker, too, and they were smoking together earlier that day. Interesting theory that he robbed her brand of cigarettes.

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Fact number two, and this really is just kind of a segue from fact number one, but her story doesn't make any sense. After this whole series of lies, she says, Well, you know, the reason I met up with him and I agreed to meet with him was I wanted to end it. I wanted to end it. Then on cross-examination, Well, yeah, like, I -- I agreed to meet with him, and then we were making out in the car, and, yeah, I didn't break anything off with him. She says, Well, you know, the reason I lied to the police was, you know, I was worried about my -- my family. The same family that when she had a death in the family that day, instead of going home to grieve with her father, she dropped everything to go make out with [the defendant] in a car. She says, Well, you know, the only reason I lied about everything was I didn't want my marriage to be over, and my marriage is such a cherished thing. And then the next statements out of her mouth were, My marriage was miserable; I wanted it to be over. And then she says, You know, I actually wanted to be with him. I wanted to be in a relationship with him. I wanted him to be my boyfriend. I was hoping this would go on to something more. Her story makes no sense. It is all over the place.

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And that takes us to fact number three. She is a liar. And I don't use that word lightly, but in this case it's warranted, because she is a liar. She has lied over and over and over. And I'm not talking about little lies. I said it in the opening and I'll say it now: These are big, brazen lies. A masked man jumping into her car? And she has the gall, the audacity to call 911, waste their time, waste the police officers' time, waste the detectives' time with her lies, lie after lie? And then with a smile on her face, comes into court today and says, You know what, I would have kept telling the lie unless the detective called me on it. I mean, that takes some audacity, to come into this courtroom with a man's life and a man's freedom on the line and to make that statement. It's disgusting. She is a liar. There's no question about that.

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Fact number four: Again, no evidence whatsoever to support her version of events. Let's talk about the evidence that we do have. [The convenience store clerk], who testified from the convenience store, she says, You know, he's a regular. I know him by name. Does that make sense? You've just committed this daring robbery. You're going to go into the place that they know you by name where you're most familiar? That doesn't make any sense. How does she describe his demeanor? He's calm, cool, collected. We stopped. We had a conversation about tattoos. I didn't notice anything unusual. And you're supposed to believe that just moments earlier he's committing a gunpoint robbery? Does that make sense? No. It doesn't make any sense.

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The BB gun, are you kidding me? An orange-tipped BB gun is the best they could put forward today. I don't know -- I'm speechless on that one. It's a toy recovered from a child's room. And for that to be collected and put forward like that has any significance in this case, that is a joke. There is no evidence. Maybe if we were all back living in the 1990s, there'd be no way of retrieving your text message communications with somebody. Nowadays, it ain't all that difficult. She says, I had contact after contact with him. Every day we were texting with one another. Has any of that been presented to you? No. Does she have any reasonable explanation? No. No, she doesn't.

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That's where you-all come in. You will never be more powerful than you are right now at this moment. Each and every single one of you individually holds this man's freedom, his future in your hands. They have the burden, the absolute burden, to present evidence to you that convinces you beyond a reasonable doubt.

Just to try to give you some context about what that really means, okay, in the jury instruction in Virginia, we've been reluctant to define it, and I won't try to define it because I'd get myself in trouble if I did. But I'll tell you what it's not. A suspicion, no matter how strong, isn't enough. A probability of guilt is not enough. It's higher than the standard that's required to take your money away from you. It's higher than the standard that's required to take your children away from you. It is the highest standard that exists in any courtroom in this country. It is the absolute gold standard of evidentiary burdens. It does not get any higher in any courtroom in this country.

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That's where we're at today, with a burden up here. And have they presented evidence to you to meet that sort of a high burden? No. No. And it's not even close. Really, the best they can do is just kind of throw up their hands and say, Well, yeah, she's a liar, but we think she's telling the truth this time, and, well, why would she lie and put herself through this? Look, we don't need to guess and read tea leaves. Look at the facts. People lie. I have zero burden. We have no burden to put on any evidence or to convince you of any theory, but I'll throw a few out there for you. Maybe he broke things off, and it was a "Fatal Attraction" sort of scenario. I'm dating myself with that reference, but Glenn Close cooking the rabbit. Maybe she's just a psycho ex. Look, you could come up with a lot of different reasons why she would lie. Spent an awful lot of money in six weeks. I know she's made a claim that, Oh, well, all our finances are kept separate so my husband would never know I was dropping $6,000 in six weeks. Take that with a grain of salt, but that could be a pretty good reason to lie. She needs to come up with an explanation for where the money went. She acknowledged, I wanted to be with him. I wanted this to be something more. Maybe when it became clear to her that wasn't going to happen, this is a pretty convenient way to get rid of him. Make up an accusation. There's a lot of different reasons that she would lie.

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But, bottom line, I have no burden to prove any of that to you, okay? That's not what we're here for. We're here to determine whether they've proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she's telling the truth. And, again, that's where you-all come in in this case. You've got a duty to pore over her story, evaluate all the inconsistencies, evaluate the seven or eight different versions of the story that she's told, and then you've got to make a determination as to whether this is somebody you can trust. Let me just put something out there. You go to a mechanic, let's say. Put your car up. Says, Hey, the brakes need to be replaced. You know you just replaced the brakes a month prior. Told you a lie. You going to go back to that guy? No. That person has zero credibility, because one lie poisons the well. Once somebody tells you a lie, that person no longer deserves to be trusted. A person lies six, seven, repeatedly to you, that person has zero, zero credibility.

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We're dealing with something a lot more important than work on a car today. We're talking about a man's life, a man's freedom. This is serious business. And that's the role that you get to play today. There's no doubt in my mind that the best system that mankind has devised so far for dealing with situations like this is a jury trial. It's the best way to avoid miscarriages of justice like the one that would occur if he was convicted in this case.

You know, this is the last time I get to talk to y'all. [The prosecutor] gets to make one last statement. That's the way it works. And that's always a very painful experience when you're the defense attorney, and you're sitting there and you want to say -- jump up and say, No, no, no, that's not the way it is; it's not so. But I can't do that. And I won't do that, and [The Judge] would get very mad at me, and rightfully so, but I do want to say this. They don't get the final word. You get the final word in this case, right? You have the opportunity to do what's right. And in just a few moments, you're going to go back into that jury deliberation room and talk amongst yourselves.

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But there's a way that I like to put this that I think makes it a little bit more meaningful to people. You can't just pass the buck off to somebody else that's on this jury. Each and every single one of you individually holds the outcome of this case in your hands. Any single one of you can stand up and prevent a tremendous injustice from occurring. Your verdict must be unanimous. All of you have the duty and obligation -- you swore to do it -- to all independently evaluate this case and to stand up for your position. This has gone on long enough. It's an injustice that the man has had his life put on hold with the sword hanging over his head for ten months on evidence that's -- it's not even flimsy. It's nonexistent. There literally is no evidence in this case. Just one liar. That's it. When you walk out of this courtroom today, you can hold your head up high with a verdict of not guilty, because when you return that verdict, you will have done the job that you swore to do. You will have ended an injustice. You will have set an innocent man free. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your attention. This isn't possible when people -- without people answering the call like you did today, so I genuinely appreciate it. I know [the defendant] appreciates it. Thank you.