On an April night in 1997, when Shonelle Jackson was eighteen, he went out to a local club in Montgomery, Alabama. As he and several friends watched a d.j. perform, a young man called Cocomo—a gang member from across town—walked up behind him and slapped him in the head, then ran off. The next day, Jackson, who had no car, approached a known thief named Antonio Barnes and asked him to steal him a ride. Jackson wanted to find Cocomo and “holler at him.”
Barnes hot-wired a Buick LeSabre, and, with Jackson driving, they picked up Barnes’s friends Poochie Williams and Scooter Rudolph. All had been drinking or smoking weed, and they were armed: Jackson had a .380-calibre handgun, Barnes had a .357, Rudolph had a 9-millimetre, and Williams had a shotgun. Cocomo could not be found, but at around 11 P.M. a small-time drug dealer named Lefrick Moore rolled past in a red Chevrolet Caprice with a booming and clearly expensive stereo system.
Jackson followed the Caprice onto a service road, sped past, and cut it off, forcing it to a stop. Guns began firing. Moore sprang from the Caprice; he was hit once, in the chest, but he attempted to run away. His friend Gerard Burdette, who was in the passenger seat, headed in the opposite direction. “No need in you running now, motherfucker!” Jackson allegedly yelled while firing his weapon.
Burdette escaped, but Moore collapsed in the street and died. Jackson and Rudolph fled in the Buick. Williams and Barnes took the Caprice, ripped out its stereo, then ditched the car in a pasture on the edge of town. After Williams showed Barnes a .380 that he said he’d found in the Caprice, they stashed their weapons in the woods and walked home. The next morning, Barnes and Jackson went to strip the vehicle, but they were run off by a farmer who had come to the pasture to feed his hogs.
Investigators had little evidence to work with: the spent casing of a single Mag Tech .380 bullet, shattered automobile glass, the fatal projectile in Moore’s heart. But two days later Barnes turned himself in, giving a “full confession,” according to a detective’s sworn affidavit, and naming Williams, Rudolph, and Jackson as accomplices. The next day, Williams and Rudolph surrendered.
The three suspects in custody identified Jackson as the sole shooter. The police went looking for him at the apartment where his mother, Marilyn, lived with his two sisters, Wanda and LaQuanda. Jackson sometimes stopped by with food or money, but mostly he stayed at Trenholm Court, a housing project on the north side of town. He had grown up there and had been reluctant to leave after his mother was evicted and moved to the west side. (“The west side got Bloods—they wear red,” Wanda told me. “On the north side, the Crips, they do blue and black. Shon affiliated with the blue and socialized with the black.”)
Jackson had started “holding” for drug dealers at Trenholm at the age of twelve. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and spent a year in juvenile lockup after helping to assault and rob a guy who, he claimed, had beat up a friend’s sister. He was currently on probation for participating in a break-in at a pawnshop. On the street, he went by Wendell—his father’s middle name. Tall and solid, with round cheeks and a bright smile, he had a deep voice and kept his hair cut low; his left forearm bore an amateur tattoo of an “S,” which his father had inked, years earlier, with a needle and thread.
Marilyn consented to an apartment search. After investigators confiscated a box of .380-calibre Mag Tech ammunition from a bedroom closet, she called Jackson and urged him to talk to the police. Together they went to the station.
It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, and his mother says that he had been smoking marijuana. At first, Jackson denied knowing Barnes, Williams, and Rudolph. Then a detective told him that his fingerprints had been found on a Dairy Queen cup in the stolen Buick. This was a lie, but it had its intended effect: Jackson eventually admitted that he had run Moore off the road. But, he added, “I ain’t kill no one.” His account of the incident is much different: he says that gunfire flew from all directions, including from Moore’s passenger, Burdette, who started shooting after Williams fired the shotgun into the air.
All four defendants were charged with capital murder—an intentional killing accompanied by another felony. In order to secure the death penalty, the state would have to prove that the defendants had intentionally killed Moore while robbing him.
Jackson went to trial first. He knew his co-defendants in passing, but hung out with a different crowd, and insisted that they had turned on him to save themselves. (After testifying against Jackson, all three pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, with the understanding that their lives would be spared.)
The D.A.’s office, possibly foreseeing the difficulty of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, offered Jackson a plea bargain: life in prison without the possibility of parole. With the death penalty on the table, he should have taken the deal. But Jackson declined.
Source: The New Yorker, Paige Williams, November 17, 2014 Issue
