Shadow of a Doubt

I.

When Mi Wha Morrison sat on the jury of a murder trial, in February 2011, the testimony that mattered most came from the prosecution’s single eyewitness, Emma Bourgoyne. The jurors listened to Bourgoyne say she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car her husband was driving, on a November day nearly seven years earlier, when the couple stopped at a red light near a highway exit in New Orleans. Bourgoyne noticed three men chatting by a curb outside an Exxon Station, their motorcycles parked nearby. All of a sudden, a fourth man came up behind them, Bourgoyne said. He raised his hand and fired a gun. “The man in the middle fell over,” she told the jury.

In the courtroom, the prosecutor asked Bourgoyne if she saw the shooter, who ran off after the killing. “He’s the gentleman sitting in the white-and-black plaid shirt over at that table,” she said, shaking with emotion and pointing to the defendant, Michael Shannon. Bourgoyne said she picked Shannon’s photo out of a lineup nearly six months after the murder. She was “a hundred percent sure” she had the right man.

But Morrison, who worked as a teacher, was surprised to hear Bourgoyne, who was in her 60s, say she’d seen the shooter for only 15 to 20 seconds — and to hear that she told a prosecutor after the murder that she hadn’t been wearing her glasses. Morrison thought about whether she’d be able to identify a person she’d seen briefly, from inside a car, six months after the fact. She was 34 and had perfect vision. It seemed like a stretch.

On cross-examination, Bourgoyne admitted that she told the police the shooter was about six feet tall and stocky, with a neck like a football player. When Shannon stood up, Morrison saw that he was at least six inches shorter, at 5 foot 6, and slight of build. It mattered to her too that Shannon was black and Bourgoyne was white. (Research shows that it’s harder for witnesses to identify people of a different race.)

Morrison wanted to hear from other eyewitnesses to the killing. Earlier in the trial, the homicide detective who investigated the shooting testified that he’d interviewed the two men standing next to the victim, a 46-year-old named Ralph Cole, and four additional people who were nearby when the shooting took place. But when Bourgoyne finished testifying, the prosecution rested. Shannon’s lawyer called no witnesses. The trial ended after only about five hours.

Mi Wha Morrison, one of the two dissenting jurors, with Shannon.

On her way to deliberate with the other jurors, Morrison thought they would easily agree: There wasn’t enough proof to send Michael Shannon to prison. But in the room, Morrison says, the foreman, who was white, took charge and argued strongly for a guilty verdict. As Morrison remembers it, the conversation veered from the facts of the case to the spike in crime in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The storm hit the city in August 2005, nine months after Cole’s murder, and its only bearing on the trial was the yearslong delay the storm caused. But as the jurors ­talked about Ralph Cole’s killing — his mother had described him working three jobs and raising a 6-year-old son with his wife — they began bringing up other crime victims they knew, as if they were somehow relevant to the guilt or innocence of Michael Shannon. (Other jurors couldn’t remember specific details or couldn’t be reached.)

When Morrison expressed her doubts about Bourgoyne’s identification of Shannon, an African-American woman on the jury agreed that the evidence was not strong enough, according to Morrison. But a second black woman was “adamant about Shannon’s guilt,” Morrison told me, remembering her saying, “If the prosecutor said he should be off the streets, then we needed to put him away.’’ Morrison continued, ‘‘I felt like they were bringing in these outside frustrations without looking much at the facts of this particular case.”

After about half an hour of deliberation, Morrison recalled, the foreman went around the table. Ten members of the jury agreed to find Shannon guilty of second-degree murder. Morrison and her ally stood their ground. In almost any other state, the jurors would have continued to deliberate. If they truly couldn’t agree, the case would have ended in a mistrial, because only a unanimous jury would have the power to convict. But in Louisiana in 2011, a vote of 10 to 2 (or 11 to 1) was enough.

When the judge praised the two prosecutors for “one of the quickest homicide cases I’ve had,” Morrison felt a surge of anger. Afterward, whenever she drove by the corner where Ralph Cole was killed, she was haunted by the photographs she’d seen of his body lying on the ground. From time to time, she also thought about how thwarted she felt in the jury room.

Last October, the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether split verdicts like the one in Shannon’s case violate the Constitution, and its decision is expected in the coming weeks or months. If the justices end the practice, they will finally close a chapter in American jurisprudence, in which two states — because of laws based in discrimination — have for decades been allowed to disregard a fundamental premise of our legal system. A result, for some defendants like Shannon, has been years behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. And for jurors like Morrison, forced to stand by as convictions take place over their serious objections, a result has been a feeling of powerlessness — as if justice had been denied not merely to the defendants but, in a sense, to them too.