Bloodsworth

by Tim Junkin

  Kirk was on the stand for slightly more than an hour. And then it was over. He was told by Judge Hinkel to step down. He wasn’t ready to step down. He felt like he’d never really gotten a chance to explain himself, to let these people on the jury get to know him, to learn and see who he really was. He thought his time on the stand was too short.

  Following Kirk, Scheinin called the four character witnesses, one after another. Each told of what a gentle and peaceful man Kirk Bloodsworth was. Each was only on the stand briefly.

  His last witness, Scheinin told the judge, would be his eyewitness identification expert, Robert Buckout. The prosecutors asked to approach the bench where they could speak out of the jury’s hearing. There they renewed their objection to Buckout’s testifying. Judge Hinkel decided to excuse the jury for the day in order to hear argument on this point. He then listened to the reasons given by the prosecution as to why Buckout should not be permitted to testify. His testimony was unscientific, they argued, unreliable. It improperly invaded the function of the jury.

  Scheinin made a proffer to the court summarizing Buckout’s credentials and experience and the gist of his expected testimony. Buckout’s opinions would criticize the way the composite drawing was made, because it unfairly led the child witness. There were limited foils to choose from. The child had to pick one of these predetermined drawings. Buckout would criticize the other identifications too. He had scientific data showing the significant likelihood of error in such testimony. Buckout took the witness stand out of the presence of the jury so that Judge Hinkel could better assess his testimony. It seemed rambling, confusing. Hinkel asked him to clarify exactly, what he intended to say. Again, Buckout was less than clear:

  My belief and sort of underlying theory is that eyewitnesses are really confronted with a difficult situation, and when the circumstances add up to a very difficult challenge to the memory system, these are the things that can happen to various parts of their testimony and various parts of their identification, and testing methods, of course is one of the areas that I have done most of my work on, and the testing method again I see as simply a tool, and the checklist is simply to provide to the jury, or elements of the checklist are provided to the jury, so that they can essentially assess what, at least, the filter of the scientist would say about a given test.

  Judge Hinkel heard it all patiently, then ruled out Buckout’s expert testimony, concluding that it not only invaded the province of the jurors but was of little value and would tend to confuse and mislead them. Closing arguments would begin the next morning, March 8.

  Scheinin was disappointed that the ruling excluded Buckout. Still, all in all, he thought the evidence had gone in well. He was confident that the state’s case fell short of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Scheinin, over the course of his representation, had come to believe that Kirk really was innocent. And after hearing all the evidence, he was certain he was going to win. That night he told all this to his client.

  Lazzaro and Brobst conferred upstairs at the state’s attorney’s office on the fifth floor of the courthouse. They both, in fact, were worried. The evidence was close, they felt, too close. They wondered whether their trial strategy would work. Neither wanted this man they believed was a child killer to go free.

  SEVENTEEN

  BLOODSWORTH’S TRIAL MADE good copy, and the local papers ran stories each day describing the contest. MURDER-RAPE TRIAL STARTS WITH GRUESOME EVIDENCE, headlined a story by Scott Shane in the Sun. DAWN HAMILTON’S COMPANIONS TESTIFY IN MURDER TRIAL was the banner headline for the March 6 edition of the News American. FOOTPRINT TENTATIVELY LINKS DEFENDANT TO SLAIN GIRL, 9, headlined another News American story written by Cynthia Skove. 5 PLACE MAN WITH SLAIN GIRL, 5 SAY HE WAS HOME, topped another for the Sun. BLOODSWORTH ON STAND, DENIES MURDERING CHILD, ran another. Some of the reports suggested that the tennis shoe had connected him with the murder, while some claimed it had not. Some stories emphasized the lack of any scientific proof that he was the killer. Some dwelled more on the identifications. Speculation was rampant as to the outcome.

  Thomas Hamilton, after testifying early on in the trial, had then sat and watched the entire drama unfold. He’d previously become convinced by Chris Shipley’s certainty, that Bloodsworth was the man who killed his daughter. He wanted to see him convicted, see him get the death sentence. But after watching the witnesses, he feared that the evidence wasn’t strong enough. Like Steven Scheinin, he expected an acquittal.

  Hamilton and the lawyers may all have underestimated the enormous unspoken pressures that exist in a case of this type. The jurors, simple citizens from the community, were asked to judge a man their own police department, after an enormous investigation, believed was guilty of a heinous crime. These jurors had been handed the responsibility for deciding whether this man went free. It was obvious that the prosecutors also believed he was guilty. Totally and completely guilty. The jurors fully realized that if they found him not guilty and he was in fact the murderer, other innocent children might be raped, tortured, killed. They’d seen the horrible and frightening photographs of what was done to Dawn Hamilton. Photographs that showed flies crawling over this little girl’s bloodied body. Yes, the judge gave them an instruction that they had to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But psychologically, emotionally, they must have wanted to believe that the state had the right man, that they had the chance to put an end to this sordid tragedy. If the evidence was even close, how in good conscience would they acquit?

  ON THE MORNING of March 8, the institutional floodlights of the Baltimore County Detention Center came on at 7 A.M. as they did every morning in the jail that had become Kirk Bloodsworth’s world. With the lights, the murky images of sleep vanished, replaced, as his mind woke, with the dread of the nightmare that had become his life—the dread of consciousness, of the place he inhabited, of what they were saying about him, and of what he would have to face that day.

  He lay unmoving for several minutes, trying to fight off the nausea in his gut, the sickness and fear in his mind, trying to find the will to move, to get off the mattress, to just stand up. Pushing aside the blanket and stepping onto the concrete floor, he walked slowly to the one slatted vent in his cell and squinted trying to see to the outside. There were spits of snow on the ground, and the air coming through was bitter cold. He kept looking out the window grate, trying to spy some grass or a bird, then had to grab the grate for support because his body started to shake and his legs to buckle. If he had the power, he thought, he would rip the grate out and jump to freedom. In a futile gesture he gave it a tug. Everything he tried seemed futile. He took a breath. He heard the rattle of food and coffee being pushed through the compartment in his cell door, but he felt sick and wouldn’t eat anything that morning. He thought of the eight women and four men on his jury, of the elderly white-haired foreman who had partly slept through the testimony and who would never look in his direction. They just can’t find me guilty, he thought. Scheinin knows what they’re going to do. They must be able to see the truth.

  After he’d washed in the stainless-steel sink in the corner of his cell, his name was called by the guard in the control booth. Officer Flaherty came to escort him to the holding pen where inmates on their way to court were assembled. Flaherty unlocked Kirk’s cell door, opened it, and gave Kirk a nod of support. The two men, Kirk dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit, and Flaherty in his prison guard uniform, walked down the hallway side by side like they were on military parade, like Flaherty was his sergeant.

  Once inside the bull pen, Flaherty gave Kirk the clothes he wore each day in court: black slacks, a white shirt, blue sweater, socks, and loafers. Scheinin had arranged for these to be at the detention center rather than the courthouse. Flaherty watched as Kirk changed into these clothes. Then Flaherty put the leg-iron shackles on Kirk’s ankles and the chain around his waist. As he placed the handcuffs on Kirk’s wrists, he could see and feel them shaking. Flaherty squeezed his hand and looked
him in the eyes. “Good luck,” Flaherty said to Kirk. “You’re a former marine. Remember that. You can handle it . . .”

  On the bus, during the ten-minute ride from the detention center to the Baltimore County Circuit Court, Kirk prayed to God for deliverance. Every day before the trial he had prayed for this. He prayed with his head bowed and his eyes shut tight.

  At the courthouse, Kirk was led to the general cell block where he was logged in. From there he was taken up the private stairway to the small holding cell behind Judge Hinkel’s courtroom. Only then were his restraints removed.

  He sat in his cell alone for forty minutes. At 9:20 A.M. he was led into a courtroom packed with spectators, media, witnesses, police—all there to hear the closing arguments of the lawyers. Kirk frantically scanned the crowd looking for and then seeing his father, Curtis, and next to him his mother, who sniffled into a white handkerchief and fearfully waved. He waved back as his two guards sat him down next to his lawyers. The courtroom quieted down and then everyone rose as Judge Hinkel took the bench. The case was called by the courtroom clerk. Judge Hinkel asked for the jury and the twelve jurors and several alternates filed in and took their seats. At the direction of the judge, the closing arguments began.

  Ann Brobst rose to present the initial argument for the state. She again thanked the jurors for their service to the community. She was direct and businesslike as she went over the testimony, witness by witness. The forensic evidence was all “neutral,” she said. It neither proved he was guilty, nor proved he was innocent. It simply meant nothing, was no help. But the many eyewitness identifications were more than sufficient to prove the defendant’s guilt. The identifications, the fact that Bloodsworth was off that day, his fleeing the city, his statements in Cambridge—all these taken together were too much to be coincidental. She argued that the alibi was too consistent, was rehearsed, contrived. She carefully chose her words as she downplayed the importance of the shoe size and the one fingerprint found on the church flyer. The shoes may not have been the defendant’s and consequently were not significant. The print could have come from anyone. There was litter all over the area. Both pieces of evidence, like the red carpet fiber, the human hair, the lack of other fingerprints, the absence of semen, were all “red herrings.” Kirk Bloodsworth’s own words, though—his admission that he’d done something bad, that he needed to check into a mental hospital, his lame story about a taco salad, his statements about a bloody rock—when coupled with the many eyewitness identifications were more than enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. She somberly asked the jurors for a conviction.

  Steven Sheinin rose to counter. He was emotional, theatrical. This time he went on and on in a rambling though passionate plea. His alibi witnesses were not perfect, but they were the people Kirk was with, he told the jury. And they were truthful. But this was not an alibi defense, he argued. “This is a case of the defense saying that the state has not met its burden of proof.” The fact that there were no fingerprints, no blood or semen matching his client’s, no hard proof, should be enough in and of itself to create a reasonable doubt. The police botched their handling of the crime scene, he argued, and failed to competently preserve the sperm and run the appropriate tests, tests that might have yielded a blood type, tests that might have matched the hair with other suspects. He questioned whether the rock was even the murder weapon, pointing out that it was crumbly, yet no rock fragments had been found in Dawn Hamilton’s wounds. The killer was somebody else, he suggested. The hair that was found next to Dawn’s body belonged to the real murderer. He tried to underscore the inconsistencies and flaws in the testimony of the eyewitnesses. He argued hard the concept of reasonable doubt. He held up a tennis shoe, mocking the shoe evidence, calling it “appalling,” and argued that Detective Ramsey, in claiming the shoes were size 10½, had “tried to perpetrate a fraud from the witness stand.” Scheinin surprised Kirk when he contemptuously threw one of the shoes toward the floor where it bounced and loudly struck the wooden panel in front of the jury box. The jurors didn’t seem to like that. It was a gesture that seemed wrong, misplaced.

  Robert Lazzaro, once again elegantly dressed in a dark blue suit, red silk tie, and gold cufflinks, rose to give the coup de grâce, the state’s rebuttal. He spoke with his usual deep, authoritative voice. His presentation, just like his opening statement, was to the point, crisp in its delivery, organized, articulate. He warned the jury not to be misled by Scheinin. “He knows all the ploys,” Lazzaro said. He shrugged off the fact that unfortunately there was no sperm, no physical evidence pointing to either guilt or innocence. He admitted that Detective Ramsey made a mistake regarding the shoe size, a simple error, hardly an effort to defraud the court. He reminded the jury that the other suspects mentioned by Scheinin—Manzari and Gray—had been cleared. He reviewed the evidence of guilt, arguing how unlikely it would be that five independent people would identify the same man if he were not the killer. He lingered over the lame explanation of what Kirk Bloodsworth claimed he meant when he admitted to his friends in Cambridge that he’d done something terrible that day and needed to go to a mental hospital. A taco salad? And were all the witnesses in Cambridge lying too? he asked rhetorically. Then Lazzaro pounded home a new trial theme, one the psychological profile suggested. He asked the jurors to look beneath the surface of Kirk Bloodsworth and to see him for what he really was, to see the “monster inside the mind.” It was this monster that finally broke free, took control, and killed Dawn Hamilton. Lazzaro cautioned the jurors again about being misled by the contrived alibi of the defense. The alibi was too perfect, he told them, too consistent. He asked the jurors to use the gift of common sense that God had given them. With his words he drove home the horror of the crime and demanded a conviction. “Convict the monster inside the mind,” the jurors heard, “the monster within . . .”

  After the closing arguments were completed, Judge Hinkel instructed the jury on the law. The elements of first-degree murder and first-degree rape were each explained. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt was required. The verdict had to be unanimous. The jury was told to retire to a back room and to begin deliberations.

  Kirk was led back into the small holding cell adjacent to the courtroom. He didn’t think the closing arguments had gone well, but he still believed that the truth would win out. He couldn’t allow himself to think otherwise.

  WHILE THE JURY deliberated, Thomas Hamilton paced the hallway outside the courtroom, wondering what the verdict would be. He held a crucifix in his hand.

  When Kirk had been taken back to the holding cell, another prisoner was sitting there, a black man with a yellow scarf wrapped over his head. He was muscular with tattoos going up each arm and showed a gold tooth when he opened his mouth. There were scars on his cheek and neck. The man had a brown paper lunch bag and sat eating a sandwich and an orange. When he finished he crumpled up the bag and left it in a corner. They sat in silence for over two hours. Finally the man spoke. “I’ve heard about your case from the guards,” he said. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and stared at Kirk strangely, like he had foreknowledge, like he was a soothsayer. “Don’t worry,” he went on. “I know you are going to be all right.” He smiled and his gold tooth flashed. “Don’t worry, man,” he said. “I’m telling you . . .”

  It was at that moment that the guards came to retrieve Kirk. The jury had reached a verdict, they told him. After only two and a half hours. Kirk turned his head to look back at the man as the guards took him out.

  The courtroom, as Kirk entered it through a side door, was even more crowded than before. Every seat was taken and people stood lining the walls on either side of the benches. Kirk couldn’t spot his father or mother. He didn’t know that Jeanette couldn’t bear any more. After the rebuttal argument of Lazzaro, with tears streaming down her face, she’d said to Curtis, “Can you take me home, now? Can I please go home now?” Kirk was totally alone.

  Judge Hinkel was already on the bench. He called for the jury.
The jurors entered in single file, heads down, somber, and not one looked at Kirk as they took their assigned seats. Kirk knew then what was about to happen. The white-haired foreman stood up. Judge Hinkel asked him if the jury had reached a unanimous verdict and the foreman nodded his head indicating that they had. “Will the defendant please stand,” Hinkel said, but Kirk was already standing. “Take the verdict,” Hinkel ordered to his clerk.

  “How do you find as to the charge against Kirk Bloodsworth for the first-degree murder of Dawn Hamilton?” the clerk asked.

  The foreman did not hesitate. “Guilty as to the charge of first-degree murder! Guilty!” he repeated, though his words were nearly drowned out. The crowd in the courtroom erupted with cheering and screaming. People were yelling, “Thank God, thank God!” One man in the back hollered, “Give him the gas!” Judge Hinkel banged his wooden gavel trying to restore order. He slammed it down again and again and then the gavel broke. Kirk’s vision began to tunnel in on itself. He saw the gavel handle land on the floor but then saw mostly darkness. He felt like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. He could hardly breathe. He held on to the rail for support. He heard the word “guilty” to the charge of rape. The cheering went on. Another call for the gas chamber. He fell to his knees. He was an innocent man, an innocent man . . . and they were cheering.