Melissa Bailey Photo
As a jury handed down a swift decision that could put Markease Hill away for life, his family reeled and one eyewitness grappled with regret.
Six minutes after entering the deliberation room Thursday, a 12-person jury emerged with a verdict. It found Hill guilty on all four counts in his double-murder trial.
The quick unanimity came after five and a half days of testimony and one full hour of instructions from Judge Joan Alexander. (Read about days one, two, three and four, and five of the trial in Superior Court on Church Street.)
“Their mind was already made up,” concluded Hope Brodie, one of Hill’s supporters and a witness for the defense. She’s pictured above at center, consoling Hill’s mom.
Defense Attorney Tom Farver said Thursday’s was the fastest verdict he has ever seen in 25 years of criminal trials.
“It’s very disappointing,” Farver said. “It just seems unlikely that they gave full attention to the evidence in so short a time.”
Hill was convicted of murdering two men, Ensley Myrick and Joey Reed, outside the Catwalk strip club on June 11, 2008. The jury found Hill guilty of two counts of murder, one count of capital felony murder for killing multiple people, and carrying a pistol without a permit.
Judge Alexander found him guilty of a fifth count, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. She will decide his prison sentence at a May 21 court date. The maximum sentence is life in prison without parole.
Myrick, 25, of East Haven, and Reed, 27, of North Branford, were best friends — “like brothers,” the families have said. Members of the families showed up diligently to each day of the trial, shedding tears most days. After the trial, they walked away arm in arm. They declined comment.
Hill’s brother-in-law, who declined to give his name, offered his sympathy to the families.
“We’re sorry for their loss,” he said, “but my brother didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“Baggage”
With no gun recovered, no videotape of the crime, and no fingerprints left by the shooter, the state’s case relied heavily on the testimony of five witnesses — witnesses who were hanging out next to a strip club at 1:30 a.m., and had all been drinking and doing various drugs.
Four of them, three of Hill’s associates and one of the victim’s friends, ID’d Hill as the shooter.
The witnesses brought complications to the stand. All five had criminal records. Two admitted lying under oath. One testified as part of a trade with the state for reduced prison time.
In closing remarks, state prosecutor Kevin Doyle admitted his witnesses had “inconsistencies.” But he urged jurors to focus on a central fact they agreed on: “They all saw one shooter, one gun.” And most important, four ID’d Hill as the triggerman.
Doyle showed jurors slides of the victims’ bullet wounds.
Hill “shot both of them in the head at close range and left them to die in their own blood,” Doyle told the jurors. A couple shed tears as he spoke.
In an hour-long closing statement, Farver urged the jury to set aside emotions and turn to logic. He asked them to carefully review the holes in witnesses’ testimony. He reviewed the inconsistencies and, in some cases, outright lies. When a person gets a little fact wrong, or tells a lie on a separate topic, it can implicate their credibility on the important stuff, he argued. He said none stands up as a reliable source of the truth.
After the swift deliberations, Farver doubted the jurors heeded his advice.
“I’m very concerned that with the severity of the charges, and the baggage that the state’s witnesses brought to the table, that people overlooked the credibility question,” said Farver (pictured).
Hill’s sister, Keena Dixon, agreed.
She said the jury should have been more skeptical of one key witness, who grew up with Hill in Fair Haven’s Quinnipiac Terrace projects. He was facing a maximum of 150 years in prison on five separate narcotics cases and a domestic violence case when he agreed to make a deal with the state: If he told the truth at the Hill trial, he’d be let out on bond, and would serve only six years in prison.
On the stand, he also admitted to lying under oath because he was mad at a cop.
Prosecutor Doyle acknowledged the witness’s baggage. But, he asked the jury, did the witness have a motive to falsely accuse his longtime friend? Did any other witnesses have a motive to do so?
Even if jurors dismissed the witness’s testimony, they’d have three more witnesses to peg Hill as the killer.
While physical evidence alone did not peg Hill as the shooter, Doyle argued, jurors could use it to corroborate parts of witnesses’ accounts, such as where the shooter was standing, and which direction the bullets flew.
“Happy Juries Convict”
How were jurors so quickly convinced?
They could not be reached for this story. A number of theories swirled around court.
From day one, the jurors appeared to get along very well. Each time they’d go into the deliberation room to wait for court to begin, giggles would spill out into the courtroom. One sunny afternoon, 10 jurors headed off for lunch together down Church Street.
“Happy juries convict,” noted one observer early in the trial, upon hearing jovial sounds from the jury room. They’re more comfortable upholding the state’s findings, the theory goes.
At 3:30 p.m. Thursday, the 12 jurors entered a deliberation room off the side of the courtroom. They sat around a table with windows facing Church Street. On the table sat a box of Cheez-Its.
At 3:31 p.m., official deliberations began. To protect their privacy, the judge ordered the courtroom cleared.
The verdict came out at 3:37 p.m. — six minutes, according to court officials.
If the jurors used a half-hour break to start deliberations early, against the instructions of the judge, that would have given them 36 minutes to deliberate.
Court resumed, and the jury read the verdict decision at 4:03 p.m. The decision came so quickly that most of Hill’s supporters didn’t make it back to the courtroom in time. Keena Dixon, whose first name is tattooed on her brother’s forearm, was one of only a few family members present. She broke out in tears when the foreperson answered “guilty” to the first count.
“Love you!” she called out as he was placed in handcuffs and taken into a side room.
“Love you!” he called back.
Hill, who’s 35, has spent most of his adult life in prison. He already served 16 years in prison for a 1991 gangland shooting in a Fair Haven barber shop. He was out from prison less than a year before he was arrested again, when he led cops on a chase that ended in a crash in Meriden — then picked up the murder charges.
Peers
For some, the racial dynamics of the case could not be ignored.
The case involved cross-racial violence. The defendant is black. The victims were white.
That divide was reflected in the audience: A mostly black audience sat on two benches to the left, behind Hill, and a mostly white crowd of victims’ families sat to the right, nearest to the jury.
The race of the jury, mostly white, added to that divide.
From day one of the trial, Hill’s supporters were skeptical the jury would give him a fair shake. Some formed that opinion the moment the jury filed in the door.
“One black person?” counted Hill’s uncle in disbelief. At the final tally, there were two black women, four white men and six white women on the jury.
“He lost already,” remarked 27-year-old William Grear upon getting his first glimpse of the group that would determine his friend’s fate.
Hill grew up in New Haven public housing. The jurors were mostly white, middle-aged, and looked like they hailed from the suburbs, Grear reckoned.
Did he get a “jury of his peers,” as the law calls for?
Defense attorney Farver said he had no reason to believe jurors were anything but race-neutral in their judgments and opinions.
He outlined the challenges of seating a jury that would look more like Hill’s peer group — young minorities who can relate to his experience.
During two and a half weeks of jury selection, a lot of minority potential jurors were dismissed from the case, for good reason, he said. A couple knew the defendant. Some knew witnesses or the circumstances of the case.
For most, the issue was financial — a murder trial can mean missing over a week of work. The state pays jurors only $50 per day, and only for the first week of the trial. And there’s a delay before the state issues jury duty checks.
In a recession, a lot of people are struggling to pay their bills, and can’t make that financial sacrifice, Farver said. Blue-collared workers tend to request dismissal because their employers won’t pay them for the days they miss. Middle-aged jurors with more stable jobs are more likely to be compensated for their missed time.
Another factor: New Haven’s judicial district stretches far beyond the borders of the city. Jury pools are drawn from voter registration and driver’s license databases in New Haven, East Haven, North Haven, Hamden, Woodbridge, Bethany, Cheshire, Meriden, Wallingford, North Branford, Branford, Guilford and Madison.
One young African-American woman from Meriden made it onto the jury, but backed out at the last minute. The woman, who’s 22, didn’t show up the first day. When the court called her, she said she had car trouble and would be unable to attend the trial.
The final slate did not sit well with Hill’s sister, Keena Dixon.
“It was written before it happened,” she said. “It just wasn’t fair at all … They just wanted somebody guilty for the crime.”
Prosecutors could not be reached for comment for this story.
‘B” Court
Farver called the small courtroom — “B Court” — “unfortunate.”
In the cramped quarters of Courtroom 5B, the jurors sat close to the victims’ families. At the sound of a sniffle, they looked over to see family members console each other.
“The judge said sympathy is not to play a part,” Farver said, but “we’re all human.”
Even when the trial was upgraded to the slightly more spacious Courtroom 4A, the Department of Corrections officers assigned to monitor Hill were unable to be inconspicuous because of the court’s small size, Farver noted. Jurors aren’t supposed to see handcuffs, leg shackles or DOC officers, because it may bias them against the defendant.
“It was a very physically poor layout,” Farver said. “Those courts are not designed to hold a murder trial.”
Would he take the case to “A” court, so to speak, through an appeal?
Farver, a private lawyer in Hamden, was assigned to the case as a special public defender, acting on behalf of the public defender’s office. He said he believes there are several issues that came up in the trial that warrant review by a higher court. The public defender’s office would make the call as to whether an appeal is filed, he said.
Foggy Memory
Another challenge of the trial was that the witnesses had all been doing drugs on the night of the crime. Together, the state’s witnesses ingested tequila, cocaine, marijuana, Heineken, “snake bites,” and maybe even a cocktail from Tommy’s booze stand, depending on whom you ask.
The issue did not appear to give jurors significant pause.
However, it left Hope Brodie with lingering regret.
Brodie testified for the defense. She said she was across the street at the time of the shootings. She said she dived into a car when she heard the shots. She didn’t see the shooting, but she contended Hill didn’t do it.
“He’s an innocent man,” she maintained after court.
She admitted she had had alcohol, angel’s dust and ecstasy pills that night. She didn’t know what was happening. “If I really been there,” she said, she could have been a better witness and maybe exonerate her friend.
“If I wasn’t so fucking high,” she said, “I could have changed somebody’s life.”
Excellent coverage. Certainly raises concerns about not just this trial, but our entire judicial system. I know there will be people who will post about Hill's family being racist, but having a jury of your peers is crucial to a fair trial. If something isn't done to make juries more diverse you've got one race continually judging everyone else. The fact is the jurers were probably unaware of any bias they might have had, but 6 minutes of deliberation is outrageous for a case of this severity. I don't know from following this story if he's guilty or not, but if what the jury was looking for was a shadow of a doubt, not only did they overlook some major shadows, they didn't even seem to take the time to consider them. This is judicial system failure plain and simple and another person of color is on his way to jail.