In 1994, Freddie McNeill, a 19 year old black man, was charged with aggravated murder. In April 1995, an all-white jury found him guilty.

 

He was arrested by a detective who was later convicted of evidence tampering.

 

He was prosecuted by a man who was later dismissed by a judge for unprofessional conduct and accused by numerous defence attorneys of withholding evidence.

 

The state’s key witness, a crack cocaine addict, gave evidence at trial that he knew the shooter, he had bought drugs off him before and that that man was the defendant. Yet, on the night of the shooting, he had stated he didn’t know the shooter, had never dealt with him before and failed to make a positive identification in a photo array. He was never charged with drug possession.

 

Of the state’s 4 child witnesses, the only one to positively identify the defendant as the shooter was inside the house and did not actually witness the shooting. The state also called an ex-girlfriend who claimed he had a gun on him earlier in the day in exchange for having her court fines waived; a detective who arrested him for cocaine possession near the pick-up point 2 years before the shooting; and a sergeant with no physical evidence to link Freddie McNeill to the shooting at all.

 

Freddie had become a suspect because he was a black male with prior cocaine possession charges whose mother lived two doors down from the crime scene. Following his arrest 2 days later,

despite a lack of confession or any physical evidence, the police stopped investigating. No ballistics testing was conducted, no gun residue tests were conducted, no weapon was ever found and many items of clothing weren’t analysed for blood.

 

It was, at best, a circumstantial case. So how was it that a judge sent this to a jury and how did none of the 12 jurors have any doubt that Freddie was the shooter? After all, the key witnesses were doubtful.