Introduction: On January 31, 2013, my client MM was arrested for the charge of second degree murder. The case went to trial the week of July 8 - 12, 2013, at the same time as another high profile case. This trial received no press coverage and therefore the jury could concentrate on applying the law to the facts as they determined them to be.
Below is the closing argument I prepared. Arguments as delivered are usually different. I use initials or made-up names in the summation so as to not cause anyone unnecessary discomfort.
Closing Argument Florida v. MM July 12, 2013
"What makes America great? Why
do people come here from all over the world? For opportunity, yes. But also for
freedom. What do we mean by that? That
in our country, a person cannot be convicted of a serious crime unless the
Government can prove its charge. At the very beginning of this trial, the
prosecutor told you to hold the State to its burden of proof, and in a few
minutes the Judge will tell you that must you do that. This is the highest
burden of proof under our system of laws and means you must be firmly convinced
that M M did not act in self defense. Proof is different than speculation.
Proof means that there are reliable witnesses and competent evidence that leave
no reasonable doubt about guilt.
This is the first and easiest reason why
the verdict in this case should be not guilty. The State of Florida has a
theory of the case but they have no proof. They have not brought in a single
witness who saw this fight and who say anything different that what M M told
the police. They haven’t brought in a single piece of evidence to prove who
brought the knife or who started the fight or to show you what happened during
the fight.
A verdict of Not Guilty
technically means “not proven.” It doesn’t mean that a jury approves of what
happened and in fact it doesn’t mean that a jury is convinced of a Defendant’s
innocence. It simply means that the
Government tried its best but failed to present sufficient evidence under the
law to justify a conviction and that there are reasonable doubts about whether
or not a Defendant is guilty. And the Judge will tell you that reasons to doubt
a case can arise from the evidence or can arise from conflicts in the evidence
or can arise from the lack of evidence. And in this case there is a complete
lack of evidence to overcome the other main principle of law, which is that you
must presume M M to be innocent and give him the benefit of the doubt unless it
is proven otherwise.
Really I could stop right
here. But in this case there is a much more important reason to find M M Not
Guilty and that is because he is innocent and the evidence demonstrates he was
acting in necessary self defense.
Every living creature understands self
preservation and in human beings it is something that is an essential component
of our lives. We go through life avoiding danger and hoping we are never in a
position where we must defend ourselves or our families but when we are
threatened with death or with great bodily harm our instincts take over and we
do whatever we must in order to protect ourselves. And that is what happened
here. M M was suddenly attacked by a larger man with a knife and M M got lucky.
He got lucky because they hit the ground and he was able to get hold of the
knife and he was able to fight off his attacker and he was able to escape and
he is still alive. And it is very unfortunate that Mr. E lost his life but
under these circumstances our laws recognize that M M did not commit a crime,
because this was a justifiable homicide:
—SHOW JURY THIS POSTER---
JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE
The killing of a human
being is justifiable homicide and lawful if necessarily done while resisting an
attempt to murder or commit a felony upon the defendant.
How do we know that M M is innocent? How do
we know that he was acting in self defense? How do we know that the verdict in
this case must be not guilty? We know because of what happened afterwards.
Now the prosecutions theory is that he
fled from the scene and tried to cover-up his crime but really, that’s not what
the evidence in this case shows. Here’s what we know:
--within an hour of this fight, M M called the
Sarasota Police Department. They didn’t have to go find him, he contacted them
of his own free volition.
--That in this phone call M M
struggled to overcome the language barrier so that he could cooperate with the
police department and follow their instructions.
--That in this phone call he
correctly identified himself and explained why he had left the scene.
--That in this phone call he
told them where he was and what kind of car he was driving;
--That in this phone call
when it became clear to him that the police wanted to talk with him, he took
the next exit and pulled over into a gas station.
--That at this gas station he
enlisted the help of the Clerk who could speak English to assist the police in
locating him;
--That he voluntarily waited
for law enforcement to arrive and did not resist arrest but was fully
cooperative;
--And that he then went to a
police station and agreed to answer all the questions that the Detectives had
for him and then cooperate with all of the photography and DNA procedures that
they asked of him.
So is it really accurate for the
prosecution to ask you to infer that M M tried to hide evidence? Yes he washed
up and changed his shirt but he didn’t try to hide anything and was completely
cooperative with the investigation.
All of his actions are the actions of an
innocent man, not a guilty man. And you should keep all of this in mind when
you are evaluating what M M told law enforcement. Think of the very first thing
that he told them:
--“I got in a fight with this
person and he tried to kill me” and that is the essence of this case. You heard
all of the rest of his statements and I am not going to review them again right
now, but there is something else important, and that is it is important that
you got to hear not just what he said, but how he said it.
It
is important that you got to hear how he was with Officer A and how M M expressed
himself and how cooperative he was. It is important that you got to hear how he
was with the Detectives during the interrogation, that you got to hear how
scared he was, that you got to hear how sad he was when he was told that Mr. E
had died, and that you got to hear how he stood up to the Detectives when they
challenged him. You have seen the transcripts but if you need to hear the
recordings again, all you have to do is ask, and I encourage you to do so,
because he was telling the truth.
--How else do we know that M
M was telling the truth? Because we can see that his injuries are consistent
with what he told the police. We can see cut on his arm that he suffered during
the initial attack by Mr. E, we can see the red marks around his neck where he
was grabbed by Mr. E. The prosecution may argue that these were minor injuries
and we say thank goodness that he wasn’t injured more but the law does not
require that you wait around and suffer great bodily harm before you are
allowed to defend yourself, you are allowed to defend yourself to prevent great
bodily harm, the Judge will tell you that you can use deadly force to prevent
someone from committing an aggravated battery or a forcible felony upon you.
The judge will tell you to
judge M M by the circumstances with which he was faced at the time and whether
he actually believed that he was in real danger. And when you are making that
decision, you can consider all the reasons M M believed he was in danger. You
can consider the fact that Mr. E is a much larger individual than M M; you can
consider the fact that Mr. E had a reputation as a violent and aggressive and
dangerous person; and you can consider the fact that Mr. Morales knew this
about Mr. E, because he was aware that Mr. E had previously killed two people in
Mexico.
Well then why go over there
if Mr. E was so dangerous? It is Because M M did not realize what danger he was
in until the attack began. He knew Mr. E and he had associated with him and he
had smoked with him in the past and M M thought that it was important that they
discuss the situation that had developed with Ally. The big mistake that M M
made is that he told on Mr. E. He told Mora that he had been out with Ally and
when he came home, Mora asked him about that and it is important that it was
Mr. E who called M M and told him to come back and M M did not know that he was
walking into an extremely dangerous situation.
During the interrogation,
the Detective continuously suggest to MM that he could have
gotten away from Jesus once the fight began and M. M: "Now, I know I could
have run, but at that moment when you’re being attacked and someone wants to
kill you, you can’t, decide, um, if you’re going to run or you’re going to
stay…” What he is communicating is that he had to make a split second
decision about how best to protect himself, just like we heard from one of the
jurors during the jury selection in this case; and just like Florida law
addresses:
Show Jury this Poster
If the defendant was not
engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a
right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground
and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he reasonably believed
that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself
or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
Now the prosecution argues
that Mr. E was unarmed and they would like you to speculate that M. M is the
one who started this fight and who brought the knife that was in evidence so
let’s examine that claim for a moment. First off there is absolutely no proof
of that assertion and I remind you that M. M has consistently denied that he
brought the knife and that Ally consented to a search of her apartment and that
no similar knives were found during that search and if there was a search of
Mr. E’s trailer it was apparently a very cursory search and the Crime Scene
Technician did not even document that in his report and could not even tell you
what areas of that trailer were looked at.
So the State is relying on
the testimony of Mora and so I must talk about her for a moment. I think it is
natural that we all feel sympathy for Mora and for her loss but the Judge will
tell you that you should not be influenced by feelings of sympathy and that you
must not decide this case because you feel sorry for anyone. And you will be
instructed how to judge the testimony of a witness and you will be told to
consider whether the witness had an opportunity to see and know the things
about which the witness testified and whether the witness had an interest in
how the case would be decided and whether the witness made an consistent
statement at some other time. And so in considering the testimony of Mora you
should think about her relationship with Mr.
E and you should consider whether or not she could even know whether he
was in possession of this knife, and you should consider the testimony of JG.
Keep in mind that J.G is M
M’s ex-wife and that she has little to do with him over the last several years,
and keep in mind that she is the assistant manager of this trailer park and
that she knows all of the people there and that she was with Mora immediately
after the fight, and that at that time Mora told her that Mr. E had grabbed the
knife and gone to fight M M.
And keep in mind that in the
courtroom Mora testified repeatedly that after Mr. E had returned home that
they had not discussed the reason for MM’s visit and that they had not
discussed the issue with Ally and that she maintained this testimony until she
was confronted with the fact that she had said something entirely different to
Detective L.
And so while we all may be
sympathetic to Mora, you as the jury in this case must ask yourself whether her
testimony is the kind of reliable information upon which you would base one of
the most important decisions you will ever be called on to make.
And just a few words about
some of the other evidence in this case. First off, the testimony of Dr. B, the
medical examiner. I am very sorry that you had to endure that testimony and
look at the graphic photographs in this case. But what is important about those
photos is that they do not show an unprovoked attack upon Mr. E. Rather, what
they show is a dynamic struggle, and they are entirely consistent with what M M
told the police. Yes, he thought he stabbed Mr. E twice, and there are more
wounds than that. But he also describes to the police how he was swinging the
knife to ward off Mr. E’s attack, and that despite this, Mr. E continued to
pursue him. The injuries to Mr. E’s
hands are not necessarily defensive wounds, but are entirely consistent with a
struggle over the knife. And the autopsy confirmed what M M told the police,
that Mr. E had been drinking and smoking marijuana.
Are the injuries that Mr. E suffered
terrible? Yes they are, but really they are nothing more than you would expect
given the circumstances of this fight and the fact that there was this life or
death struggle over the knife.
Finally, there are the text
messages between Ally and MM. Now the prosecutions theory is that because these
messages show Jealousy, that they prove that M Mwent over to do harm to Mr. E.
But is that what they really show? I would suggest that all that these messages
show is that M M and Ally are human, and that means they make the same mistakes
and have the same faults that all humans do. It’s just that in these modern
times in which we live, what used to be very private conversations are now
preserved for all time for anyone to see, thanks to text messaging. But what is
really important about these messages is what is not in there. MM never says
anything threatening about anyone, it is clear that he wants to know what Ally
and Mr. E did, but not because he wants to hurt anyone. And keep in mind that
there were phone calls taking place between the two of them as well, and that
their final conversation around 5:30 was that MM was going to go to the gym and
then come home and help Ally cook dinner. This is consistent with what MM told
the police, and with the fact that he went over to Mr. E’s trailer with only
his shorts and his t-shirt and tennis shoes.
At the end of this case, the
most important instruction that you will hear from the Judge is this one:
Show Jury this POSTER (RD self defense)
If in your consideration of the issue of self-defense you
have a reasonable doubt on the question of whether the defendant was justified
in the use of deadly force, you should find the defendant not guilty.
Why is this the law? Because in the United
States of America, we have made the determination that the Only thing worse
than being falsely accused is to be falsely convicted. Don’t let that happen to
M M. He acted in self defense, the homicide of Mr. E was justifiable, and the
lawful verdict in this case is NOT GUILTY.
I thank you very much for
your service."
After four hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty.
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