Framed

Last Night Out

JIM McCLOSKEY

Mark Jones, a native Texan from Corpus Christi, was two months shy of his twenty-first birthday.

He was about to get married to the love of his life, Dawn Burgett, the pretty twenty-year-old daughter of a career soldier.

Their wedding date was set for Saturday, February 1, 1992.

Jones had worked as a radio operator in Desert Storm and was now stationed at Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Georgia.

They planned to wed in the base chapel.

This was to be no small affair.

Dawn and her mother had invited 150 people.

Mark’s mother had come in from the Florida Keys; his father, wheelchair-bound, from Texas.

Family and friends had traveled from the Burgetts’ home state of Tennessee.

Dawn’s parents loved Mark; he was the son they never had.

After the wedding rehearsal at the base chapel on January 31, sixteen family members and friends arrived at the Golden Corral restaurant in Hinesville for the rehearsal dinner.

Despite a reservation mix-up that didn’t get them seated until 8:15, everyone was in a festive mood and looking forward to the next day’s big event.

Among the dinner guests were two of Mark’s best buddies from the base, Kenneth Gardiner and Dominic Lucci.

A fellow Texan, twenty-one-year-old Kenny had arrived at Fort Stewart five months earlier from assignment in Germany.

Before that, he, too, had served in Desert Storm, working as a mechanic on vehicles and tanks.

Twenty-two-year-old Dominic, whom everyone called Dino, had been born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

After a one-year tour in Korea, he had been transferred to Fort Stewart, where he worked as a food specialist. This would be his last billet before discharging from the army.

After dinner a group of the young people drifted out to the Golden Corral’s parking lot, trying to decide where to go from there.

Kenny and Dino wanted to take Mark to a club for his last night as a bachelor.

Mark, a teetotaler, was reluctant and wanted to call it a night.

But Dawn urged him to join his friends and even suggested a local club that was having a bikini contest.

At 9:30 everyone went their separate ways.

Dawn returned to her parents’ house, while the three soldiers headed to the club holding the bikini contest.

Mark was carded at the club and, since he was not yet twenty-one, denied entry.

Dino came up with a backup plan: a strip club in Savannah called Tops Lounge that he had been to once.

Since Mark and Kenny were not familiar with Savannah, Kenny let Dino drive his new 1992 black, two-door Chevrolet Cavalier, a recent gift from Kenny’s father.

Off they went, driving the only route Dino knew, forty-eight miles along 95, taking the Route 204/Abercorn Street exit and then heading east onto Victory Drive to Tops Lounge.

As they were driving, thirty-five-year-old Stanley Jackson, a black man, was walking in a dangerous part of Savannah known locally as “Hazard County,”

the epicenter of the drug trade where buyers and sellers came and went.

At 10:05 he was gunned down by a barrage of bullets as he stood at the corner of 33rd and East Broad Street.

James White, also black, was a married thirty-eight-year-old father of eight children, employed as a bus driver and serving as an assistant minister at a small black Baptist church in Savannah.

At the moment of the shooting, he was standing at his front door, about to let himself in.

Hearing gunshots, he turned in their direction and saw sparks hitting the street.

Then he saw a car come out of seemingly nowhere, screeching to a halt in the middle of the intersection.

He told the police when interviewed at the crime scene that two men were leaning out of the car shooting back toward the victim with some kind of rifles.

He said that the killer’s car remained in the intersection during the shooting for only a few seconds before it sped off, going north on East Broad.

A police officer one mile away heard the gunfire and headed in that direction, arriving at the crime scene close to 10:10 p.m.

Five shell casings were recovered.

Tests later determined that all casings were fired from the same AK-47 assault rifle. Bullet holes riddled a nearby home, though thankfully no one was hit.

Although an autopsy revealed no bullets or bullet fragments in Jackson’s body, he had been hit six times by bullets that passed through him.

What caused his death were spinal bone fragments that pierced both lungs, causing severe hemorrhaging.

Toxicology tests found a “significant level”

of cocaine in Jackson’s blood, and he’d been carrying a homemade crack pipe.

At his death he was on probation for purchasing what he believed to be a rock of cocaine from an undercover agent at a Savannah drug house.

Oblivious to the shooting that had occurred four miles away just ten minutes before, the three young white soldiers arrived at Tops Lounge around 10:15, where Mark got carded again, this time by the Tops Lounge doorman.

Listening to the soldiers failing to talk their way in, a taxicab driver and an arriving customer suggested they go to another strip joint, Club Asia.

The soldiers got directions and headed for the club, driving north on East Broad until they ran up against the police barricade at the Stanley Jackson crime scene.

Here, a police officer gave them new directions and pointed them away from the scene.

Still uncertain, they then asked an off-duty cop working as a security guard at a Kroger’s for the best route to the club. Finally, they approached a uniformed police officer, Deborah Evans, while she was waiting to cross the street. She directed them to Club Asia, only a few blocks away. Once seated in the club, Kenny and Mark ordered Cokes and Dino ordered a beer and a shot of Soju, a Korean liquor.

Little did they know that their world was about to collapse.

Officer Evans had been waiting to cross the street with James White, the eyewitness to the killing of Stanley Jackson.

She was escorting White from the crime scene to Savannah Police headquarters, commonly called “the Barracks,”

so that detectives could take his statement.

It was a few minutes after 10:30, thirty minutes after Jackson had been mowed down.

After the soldiers had driven away, White told Evans that their car “looked like”

the killers’ car.

With that, all hell broke loose.

Evans immediately called for backup, dropped White off at the station, and hurried over to Club Asia.

Within minutes a swarm of police had escorted the three men out of the club.

They were made to stand in front of it so that White, whom they had brought over from the Barracks, could see them more clearly and identify them as the shooters. He could not.

In the parking lot, police searched the car with Kenny’s consent and found nothing of evidentiary value—no weapons, no ammunition, no spent shell casings, no dents from ejected shell casings, nothing that connected the car or the soldiers to Jackson’s murder or any other crime.

The car was later vacuumed and closely inspected for gunshot residue, with negative results.

Nonetheless, at 10:50 p.m.

the soldiers were transported a short distance to the Barracks for questioning.

A phalanx of detectives and their bosses reported to the Barracks to lend a hand with the all-night investigation.

The lieutenant in charge of the violent crime division, D.

Everette Ragan, and Assistant District Attorney David Lock took charge of the investigation.

The police interrogated the young men separately for two hours, trying to extract confessions through pressure and lies.

Each of them was falsely told that the other two had confessed, so it would go easier on him if he would also confess.

All three insisted on their innocence and offered consistent accounts of their whereabouts that day and night leading up to their interrogation.

Police went to Tops Lounge at 3:00 a.m.

and interviewed the doorman who had carded Mark.

He affirmed the soldiers’ alibi and told the police that all three boys had tried hard to convince him to let them in, that all they wanted to do was help Mark celebrate his wedding the next day.

He characterized them as “just three guys wanting to have a good time at a titty bar.”

Dino refused to be bullied and threatened to walk out of the station.

He was then handcuffed to a chair and stuffed in a closet.

When he kicked open the closet door, he was arrested.

Mark was worn out and in tears when they told him that he was under arrest for murder.

Meanwhile, James White was in another part of the building giving a detailed statement to rookie homicide detective Harvey Middleton.

Twice in the statement he said the Gardiner car “looked like”

the shooters’ car, but by the conclusion of his statement he had changed this to the soldiers’ car being “one and the same”

as the killers’ car.

He also stated first that he thought the shooters were either white or Creole, then later in the statement said they were white.

Middleton got what he wanted—a car identification.

But White’s initial description of the car at the crime scene had been markedly different from that of the Gardiner car.

White had first told Middleton that the killers’ car was an older model, “?’85 to ’90,”

with tinted windows, and was “bigger in the back and smaller in the front.”

The new 1992 Gardiner car was just the opposite—big in the front and small in the back, and it did not have tinted windows.

The three young men were not your everyday suspects.

None of them had any prior encounters with either civilian or military police—no arrests, no convictions, no problems whatsoever with law enforcement of any kind.

None of the three used drugs, nor did they abuse alcohol.

There was no connection between the soldiers and Jackson.

The young men had neither motive, means, nor opportunity to commit such a heinous crime.

Nonetheless, with only a car ID, sometime after 2:00 a.m., ADA Lock and Lieutenant Ragan decided to hold the men for murder and ordered them transported to the Chatham County jail.

—

In 1991, more than 40 percent of Savannah’s approximately 140,000 residents were black.

White men, however, held all the political power, as they always had.

There was growing racial tension between the long-tenured all-white city fathers and the politically active black civic and church leadership.

Very little room existed in Savannah’s calcified city government for racial diversity or mutual understanding.

In recent years, a nationwide crack cocaine epidemic had fueled an explosion of violent crime as drug gangs committed brutal killings in most major cities.

In Savannah, the all-black Ricky Jivens gang was particularly murderous.

The homicide rate in the city had tripled in two years, from twenty-one dead in 1989 to fifty-nine in 1991.

By the time of the murder at 33rd and East Broad in late January 1992, there had been five homicides already in Savannah, predicting an annualized rate of seventy-two.

Stanley Jackson’s was the sixth.

Black community leaders had become increasingly frustrated with law enforcement, who they saw as failing to invest the same effort in solving cases involving black victims as white ones.

The issue had come to a head in mid-September 1991 when a sixteen-year-old runaway and prospective member of the Jivens gang randomly shot to death a man and his dog in the upscale white Savannah neighborhood of Ardsley Park.

The affluent residents were outraged and afraid.

In response, Mayor John Rousakis and Police Chief David Gellatly called press conferences and personally met with the Ardsley Park residents, assuring them that the killer would be brought to justice.

A score of detectives was assigned to the case.

The disparity in how officials reacted to this one white person’s murder compared to the thirty-seven black murder victims that year infuriated the city’s black leadership.

They held press conferences and asked why Savannah city leaders had not visited or shown equal concern for their communities.

In the November election, black voters had a chance to express their anger.

Democratic mayor Rousakis suffered a stunning defeat in his bid for a sixth consecutive term, losing to transplanted New Yorker Susan Weiner, the first woman and only the second Republican to win the Savannah mayorship in the city’s two-hundred-year history.

The Savannah Morning News, the city’s leading newspaper, credited Weiner’s shocking victory to black voters crossing over to the Republican ticket.

She had made crime her leading issue; her campaign billboards plastered throughout the city featured no words, only bullet holes.

Stanley Jackson’s murder thus unfolded in a Savannah deeply divided along racial fault lines—Jackson was a black man shot by at least two white men, according to a black eyewitness who called himself “Reverend,”

and now three young white soldiers, by sheer happenstance, had fallen into law enforcement’s lap.

The authorities believed that if they could find enough evidence to convict the three men, they could demonstrate to the black electorate that black victims were just as important to law enforcement as white victims.

Mark, Kenny, and Dominic became perfect scapegoats.

The three young soldiers would not receive justice.

They would be sacrificed on the altar of politics.

—

The Savannah police quickly figured out how to use TV cameras to their advantage.

They alerted the media, and at some time after 2:00 a.m., TV cameras were waiting to film the soldiers as they were led out of the Barracks in handcuffs on their way to the county jail.

Even before Jackson’s body had been removed, cameras were at the crime scene.

By giving the media easy access, the assistant district attorney made the Fourth Estate, formerly an enemy, into his new best friend.

(Later, during the trial, cameras were allowed in the courtroom, a rare event in Savannah at that time. The trial was the lead story on all TV channels each night of the proceedings.)

In shock, still unable to comprehend what had just happened to him and his friends, Mark made a collect phone call to Dawn at her parents’ house sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.

He asked her not to be angry with him, and then stunned her with the news that they were in the Savannah jail “because they think we murdered someone.”

In a state of panic, Dawn raced to his mother’s hotel, banged on her door, and told her where Mark and his friends were and why.

For the next fifty minutes they drove to downtown Savannah, arriving before dawn.

Miraculously they were permitted to visit all three men together through a window.

The only thing Dawn remembers from the visit is that someone at the jail gave her Mark’s blue jacket.

Later that morning, Dawn wrote a notice and taped it to the base chapel’s door that read, Wedding of Dawn Burgett and Mark Jones Canceled Due to Family Emergency .

On February 6, a week after their arrest, a bail hearing was held for the three men.

Dino’s grandfather retained local criminal defense attorney Bill Cox for his grandson.

He also provided the funding for Cox to recruit John Watts, Sr., to represent Kenny, and Watts’s son, John Watts, Jr., to represent Mark.

Bail was set at $30,000 for each defendant.

In mid-April, when their families came up with the funds, Kenny and Dino were released and remained free through the trial. Mark, however, stayed in jail awaiting trial because his family could not raise the bail.

The preliminary hearing, during which the State was required to present evidence sufficient for the defendants to be held for trial, was scheduled for February 26.

As the date neared, political pressure mounted.

On February 19, more than two hundred people from the black community, including Stanley Jackson’s friends and family, held a candlelight vigil at the intersection of 33rd and East Broad.

The speakers criticized city officials for not attending and lamented once again that “when one man died in Ardsley Park, everybody showed up.”

The next day, a thirty-member contingent from the Jackson vigil attended a city council meeting.

Although the group was not on the agenda, Mayor Weiner, in her second month in office, allowed its spokesperson, Rev.

Leonard Small, to speak.

He admonished Savannah officials for treating cases of black victims differently than those of white victims, citing the Ardsley Park murder, and called for an end to Savannah’s “institutional racism.”

He prayed for “racial unity”

and “equal treatment in Savannah.”

One week later, at the preliminary hearing, witness White for the first time claimed that he could positively identify Jackson’s shooters, pointing to Gardiner and Jones.

He testified that when he saw their faces at the bond hearing (during which bail was set), it suddenly came to him that they were the men who shot Jackson.

He added that it was “definitely” them.

Needless to say, this greatly strengthened the prosecution’s case against the defendants.

ADA Lock now had an eyewitness who could identify two of the soldiers as the shooters, and the Gardiner car as the vehicle used by the killers.

The State tried to get Dino to turn against his friends, maintaining that since he’d been the driver and not a shooter, he could get twenty years for voluntary manslaughter in exchange for testimony naming Jones and Gardiner as the shooters.

He soundly rejected this.

On the eve of the trial, the State tried again, significantly improving their offer to eighteen months for involuntary manslaughter if he would incriminate his codefendants.

Without the slightest hesitation Dino refused, saying years later that there was no way he would “sell out my friends and myself for something none of us did.”

The trial opened on November 9, 1992.

The jury panel consisted of nine white jurors and three black jurors, together with two black alternate jurors.

The State’s case relied heavily on the testimony of James White, who spiced up his eyewitness account by telling the jury that “I saw them good.

I was looking right at them.”

When asked by Lock if he was “positive that the individuals you’ve identified in court are the ones you saw in the intersection shooting that night,”

he responded, “I’m positive.”

Yet his testimony seemed to undercut his certainty, emphasizing as it did the brevity of his observation and the fear he felt for his life.

On the night of the shooting, he testified, he was returning to his home from a church service.

As he was fumbling for his keys at his front door, he heard heavy gunfire coming from around the corner of the intersection of 33rd Street and East Broad Street.

When he turned to look toward the intersection, he saw sparks hitting the street like “fire.”

Then a car came into view and stopped in the middle of the intersection.

He saw “fire coming from the guns”

of what he claimed were two men leaning out of the passenger side window of the car, shooting back toward the victim.

He couldn’t tell if the fire was coming from one or both guns.

Before he knew it, the car sped off, tires screeching.

Clearly traumatized, he thought he was in “a war zone.”

He observed the shooting for “three to four seconds” at the most.

During the shooting he backed up hard against the door and banged three or four times loudly for his wife, Suzette, to let him in.

When she finally came to the door he was so “upset and shaken,”

he had her call the police because he couldn’t speak.

Months before the trial, on March 6, 1992, a recently retired E-6 staff sergeant, Sylvia Wallace, had come forward to give Detective Middleton a statement to which she now testified at trial.

Her disjointed story was that, on Friday morning, January 31, 1992, she and Mark Jones were chatting in front of the barracks following the conclusion of a major battalion inspection requiring Battle Dress Uniform.

When she asked Jones what he was doing that weekend, he replied that he “was going to go into Savannah, that he was going to get married on Saturday, and that he had somebody in Savannah he was going to shoot.”

When she asked him who, he said, “I got a black guy up there I got to get.”

Under cross-examination Wallace admitted that she’d had unspecified “problems”

at the time she claimed Jones had made his racist remarks, and that these problems, coupled with stress, had led her to destroy all her army-related possessions except her military dress uniform and to retire after twenty-one years of service.

Mark was stunned when she appeared on the witness stand and fabricated this exchange.

He barely knew her.

They were in the same battalion but different companies.

She was twice his age. They had what he considered to be a cordial but very superficial relationship.

Mark’s company commander and Mark’s roommate both contradicted her testimony, testifying that on the day in question Mark was on leave preparing for his wedding, and that there had been no inspection of any kind.

ADA Lock played the race card again with his next witness.

He tried to elicit racially charged testimony from Private First Class Heather Radford, a twenty-one-year-old single mother of a six-month-old.

She and Kenny Gardiner had been stationed at the same time in Saudi Arabia and in Germany prior to their September 1991 arrival at Fort Stewart.

They were casual friends but nothing more than that.

Among other explosive questions, Lock asked Radford if she remembered telling his two investigators during an interview a month before that Gardiner had told her that he “hated niggers period, he would always say he hated niggers ’cause they wanted to take over the party and the music and the women.

He said he would like to dress up in black and kill them.”

She denied ever telling the investigators this.

Under cross-examination by the defense, she testified that, after her meeting with the two investigators, she met with Lock.

During this interview, Lock kept insisting that Gardiner had made that statement, that he hated blacks and wanted to kill them.

He pressed her, asking five or six times if Gardiner made that statement.

She insisted that Gardiner had never said such a thing.

To rebut her, Lock brought in his two investigators, J. D. Smith and Glen Kessler, who both testified that Radford had told them that Gardiner had made these statements.

Smith admitted under cross-examination that they had not taped the interview nor drawn up a statement for her to sign.

Since ADA Lock was at a loss to establish a motive for the killing, and knew that there was no connection between the defendants and Stanley Jackson, he decided to accuse the soldiers not only of being racist but also dangerous thrill-seekers.

It had been established at trial that the young men loved to play Dungeons instead, “reading was his top priority.”

Within days of the soldiers’ arrest, both Kenny’s company commander and Detective Middleton searched Kenny’s quarters and the trailer that Kenny shared off-base with Dino.

Nothing was found indicating any racial bias, nor anything of evidentiary value: no hate literature or anything related to crime or violent behavior, only comic books and science fiction paperbacks.

The record clearly absolved Mark Jones of even a hint of racism.

First of all, he came from a biracial family.

His stepfather was a black jazz musician.

The army report on Mark shortly after his arrest described him as “a naive, innocent individual…who has a positive attitude and performs his job in an efficient manner.”

It goes on to say that “PV2 Jones has never shown any indication of racial prejudice, and has no significant problems working with Sergeant Davenport, a black American.

He has worked diligently by his side for the past two years.”

Sergeant Davenport said that it was “preposterous”

to think Mark would commit a murder.

He testified at Mark’s bond hearing that he had been Mark’s squad leader for more than two years, including their time together in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and that Mark was “not violent nor has he given people any trouble.”

He visited Mark three times in the county jail before he left for Germany on assignment.

Mark’s black roommate, Aaron McAbee, testified at trial that Mark had invited him to the wedding, and that he’d never had any type of racial problem with Mark.

It was common for soldiers of every racial stripe—whites, blacks, and Hispanics—to congregate in Mark and Aaron’s room and watch TV.

Mark’s black supervisor who served with him in Desert Storm, Eric Bibbs, told the jury that Mark “is not a mean or violent person,”

and that he liked people regardless of their race or color.

There is not much in the record about Dominic Lucci’s racial attitudes.

For whatever reason, the prosecution did not attempt to paint Dominic as racist.

E-7 Special First Class Sergeant Marinaro supervised Dino soon after he arrived at Fort Stewart in October 1991 from his one-year tour in Korea.

When Marinaro was interviewed by the police the week after Dino’s arrest, he told them that he “didn’t think Lucci was prejudicial.”

The defense also made the point that thorough searches of the defendants’ car and quarters had turned up no evidence against them.

(Neither the police nor prosecution could ever account for where or when or how the soldiers were able to dispose of the weapons or ammunition, or why the car contained no forensic evidence of involvement in a drive-by shooting using assault rifles.) In addition, all three of them had clean records, did not do drugs, did not know the victim, and had no motive, means, or opportunity to kill him.

The defendants did not testify.

Their attorneys thought they had presented a strong case, and therefore there was no need to risk Lock confusing and baiting the young defendants on the witness stand.

Just before jury deliberations began, a white juror reported to the judge her concerns that, throughout the two-week trial, another juror, a black female, made no secret of the fact that she knew the victim’s father and that she believed the defendants were guilty.

She was excused and replaced by a black male alternate who lived two blocks from where Jackson had been shot.

This juror admitted to “hearing neighbors talking about how it happened and everything…you hear different things all the time.”

The defense challenged this juror, but Judge Perry Brannen denied his removal.

Jury deliberations began at 3:30 p.m. on November 19, 1992. By 11:51 p.m.

they reached their verdict: All three defendants were guilty of malice murder.

As soon as the jury departed the courtroom, Judge Brannen, in a hurry to finish the case, began a brief nine-minute sentencing hearing.

No testimony was taken and the attorneys spoke for only a few minutes.

At 12:05 a.m.

on November 20, a scant fourteen minutes after the guilty verdict, the judge sentenced the three men to life in prison.

He later admitted that he secretly had the National Guard on call in case the soldiers had been acquitted. Throughout the trial, the Savannah authorities had feared there might be race riots akin to those in Los Angeles following the April 1992 acquittal of the LAPD officers in the Rodney King assault trial.

The defense attorneys were as appalled as anyone by the verdict and went to work pro bono seeking evidence challenging the conviction.

Six jurors provided affidavits stating their belief that the soldiers did not get a fair trial because of abuses during jury deliberations.

The jurors described how a fellow juror, Murphy Cooper, a black attorney, intimidated those leaning toward acquittal, accusing them of being racially prejudiced.

He told them that unless they unanimously voted to convict the soldiers, there could be racial disturbances in Savannah similar to those in Los Angeles seven months earlier.

Cooper also erroneously told them that anyone who voted to acquit would be identified in open court and could therefore expect racial retaliation.

In 1994, the Georgia Supreme Court denied an appeal of the conviction based on these juror affidavits, ruling that state law disallowed jurors from impeaching their own verdict unless “extraordinary circumstances”

beset a particular case, and this case did not rise to that level.