The Brooklyn Ink

The Brooklyn Supreme Court was abuzz Friday, as people waited for a verdict in the hate crime trial that never came.

By Nate Rawlings

A curious thing happened Friday between the hours of 3 and 7 p.m. in Part 15 of the Brooklyn Criminal Courthouse.

Clerks strayed from their desks and walked around the room. Judge Patricia Di Mango chatted politely with reporters she hadn’t seen for a while. Prosecution and defense lawyers, figurative and actual adversaries, talked about anything but the trial. Reporters, sans notebooks, made conversation purely for the sake of conversation.

For five hours earlier in the day, Judge Di Mango had dealt with the jury’s notes. By law, a judge cannot communicate with a jury except in the courtroom with prosecution and defense counsel present. When the jury is in deliberations, they pass written notes through a court officer.

Notes from a jury contain requests and announcements. Some ask to review testimony; others seek clarification about the law. Judges dread a note from the jury that says they have reached an impasse and cannot agree on a verdict.

Friday, Judge Di Mango received 13 notes from Keith Phoenix’s jury, each requesting additional information. She brought the jury back into the courtroom four separate times to read transcripts from witnesses and finally to explain the law. A few minutes before 3 p.m., Judge Di Mango sent the jury to their deliberation room. Until she received the most important note, the one saying the jury has reached a verdict, the only thing left was the wait.

In the trial of Keith Phoenix and Hakim Scott, who were charged with attacking and killing Ecuadorian immigrant Jose Sucuzhanay in early December 2008, two juries considered testimony: the red jury and the green jury.

The green jury heard final arguments from lawyers on Wednesday May 5 and returned a verdict after only a few hours of deliberations. Thursday afternoon, they found Scott guilty of manslaughter and attempted assault but not guilty of second-degree murder and of committing a hate crime.

The red jury, charged with deciding the fate of Keith Phoenix, would not be so quick. On Friday, they asked to review the medical examiner’s testimony where he rendered an expert opinion on what exactly caused Sucuzhanay’s death. They listened as Judge Di Mango read a transcript of eyewitness accounts, seeking clarification as to whether Phoenix yelled racial and homophobic epithets.

Judge Di Mango read Kimberly Taylor’s account of the attack, a blow-by-blow description of Phoenix smashing Jose with a baseball bat at least five times. Jose’s brother Romel, who survived the attack, sat in the second row. Di Mango quoted from Taylor’s testimony transcript that Phoenix brought down the bat “on top of Jose’s head with all his might, with all his body so his body jerked.”

Romel leaned forward and cupped his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes as his brother Diego patted him on the back. Romel has attended nearly every day of the trial and has heard, in vicious detail, more than a half dozen different people describe his brother’s murder. Even after the testimony was complete, he had to endure Taylor’s words, in a different voice, one more time.

The fourth time the jury came back to the courtroom, Judge Di Mango explained the differences between second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault. She re-read the definition of a hate crime. After she was satisfied that the jurors now understood her explanations, Judge Di Mango sent them back to deliberate.

For the next four hours, everyone in the packed courtroom waited. The Sucuzhanay brothers read a Spanish-language newspaper and talked quietly. A photographer watched episodes of “Star Trek” on his Iphone.

At ten minutes to seven, Judge Di Mango announced that she would send the jury home for the weekend. There would be no verdict today.

The Sucuzhanay family walked slowly out of the courtroom. They said little to the assembled press, other than that they missed Jose terribly, and they hoped the entire ordeal would finally be over on Monday.