Jury Aquits in Matter of Hours
By Charles Sweeney
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
JAY STREET — A Brooklyn jury on Monday acquitted a man charged with shooting to death his childhood friend in a Bedford-Stuyvesant tenement hallway in June 2003, the very hallway where the 23-year-old victim, Yusuf Wilkerson, had been reduced to spending his nights after a life of petty and not-so-petty crimes.
After the foreperson read the not-guilty verdicts, Rashaun Smith thanked the jury out loud, amid the audible sighs and shrieks of relief from Smith’s family members who’d been gathering in the courtroom’s gallery each day of the two-week trial.
“He was very emotional,” defense attorney Gary Farrell said. “If you’d walked into the courtroom just then, you wouldn’t know if he’d been acquitted or convicted, because there were tears of joy. He’s just an emotional guy.”
Detectives Went South
Smith learned he was a suspect in the three-year-old, unsolved killing after getting a visit from an NYPD detective in Florida, where he’d since moved with his wife and daughters to escape the neighborhood in which he’d grown up.
Unlike his two friends at the center of this case, Smith had no criminal record. He was somehow able to stay clear of the criminal lifestyle that claimed Wilkerson and Alan Stewart, the other key figure in the trial.
Stewart, the prosecution’s key witness in the case, was a cousin of Wilkerson and a friend of Smith’s since they were all boys together.
Stewart was at the tenement building on Hancock Street that night. He’d been sleeping at his sister’s apartment on the fourth floor. He told the jury that on the night of the murder he’d been awakened by gunshots coming from the hallway outside. When he went to investigate, he saw Smith cradling Wilkerson’s blood-soaked, lifeless body.
Stewart also testified that the day after the shooting, Smith told him he’d shot Wilkerson; a claim the jury ultimately rejected.
Because he was the only witness to testify about that night, the case swung on Stewart’s credibility as a witness, according to prosecutor Thomas Ridges. And Stewart did have a credibility problem.
Farrell cross-examined Stewart, cataloguing a stunning array of violent offenses, including three felony convictions by the age of 16. Most disturbing was Stewart’s unofficial membership in a loose group called the “Knock-Out Posse,” whose members’ sole purpose was to stalk strangers on the streets and see if they could knock them out with one punch.
“I’d like to think that my cross-examination of Alan Stewart was effective,” Farrell said. “I think I sowed a bit of doubt in the minds of the jury as to his character.”
Plans for the Future
Stewart, who was extradited from Kissimmee, Florida to stand trial for Wilkerson’s murder, is anxious to resume his life far from Bedford-Stuyvesant, according to Farrell.
“I know he’s very anxious to go back to Florida to be with his family and see his daughters,” Farrell said. “Hopefully he’ll be able to resume his normal life again. This has been a long ordeal.”
Farrell said his client was a law-abiding citizen leading a productive life far from the streets where he’d grown up, far from the legacy of crime and squalor that he seems to have outrun — demons to which Stewart and Wilkerson fell prey.
“Rashaun, well, he’s just a different kind of guy,” Farrell observed. “He had a genuineness to him that Alan Stewart just didn’t have. And I think the jury picked up on that.”
The jury did seem to take more than a passing interest in the case, as juries tend to do whenever the intimacies of a defendant, or a victim, become part of the public record and details of a life become known through sometimes-emotional testimony.
“Several jurors even waited out in front of the courthouse,” Farrell said. “Several of them came over and hugged him and his family.”
Prosecutor Ridges had said in his closing remarks to the jury that the case depended on Stewart’s testimony, and whether the jury believed him or not.
“The jury made their decision,” Ridges told the Eagle after he heard the verdict. “I’m not going to second-guess a jury.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2006
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