Runaway jury: Macon man’s murder trial canceled after three panelists are no-shows
If ever the local history of COVID-19 is written, the backlogged havoc that the coronavirus pandemic afflicted the court system with may well pale in comparison to the unholy mess that became of the jury impaneled Monday in the murder trial of Jeremy Jerome Kendrick Jr.
Two prosecutors and a defense lawyer had worked painstakingly into the evening on Monday selecting jurors in what was to be Bibb County’s first murder trial since February 2020.
Shortly after 6 p.m., 14 jurors, two of them alternates, were chosen to hear the case, one that strikes at the heart of Macon’s youth-violence epidemic.
Kendrick, the young man on trial, is accused of murdering two convenience store clerks during robberies in August 2018. He was 17 when the alleged crimes occurred. He turns 20 next month and has been in jail since he and a 16-year-old alleged accomplice were arrested in the days after the killings.
Now Kendrick must wait until at least June, the soonest a new jury can convene in light of what happened Tuesday in Superior Court Judge Howard Z. Simms’ courtroom.
Or, rather, what did not happen.
Three jurors don’t show up
The opposing lawyers didn’t so much as clear their throats, and testimony never began.
That was because three of the jurors — having been duly informed before leaving the courthouse on Monday evening that they had been chosen to sit on the jury — decided for various reasons not to show up for opening arguments.
Barely 15 hours after the judge had congratulated the jurors (“You all are the first jury in Bibb County in 14 months,” he’d said) and instructed them to return by 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, courthouse officials were scrambling to locate the no-shows.
Each eventually showed up — at least one of them driven to court after being fetched by a sheriff’s deputy — and each arrived with varying degrees of excuses.
One man had transportation problems. Another said he had a heart condition and was in the emergency room. And one woman said her hearing aid had failed her on Monday evening when the judge told her what time to be back the next morning.
None, however, had mentioned said issues during numerous opportunities to speak up in the selection process.
“My battery busted,” the woman with the hearing problem said of the hearing aide in one of her ears.
“I really do apologize,” she said after being called before the bench in open court Tuesday afternoon to explain her absence.
She and the other two no-shows may be issued contempt-of-court citations.
Judge questions jurors
Judge Simms’ dismay was apparent in tones that approached bafflement as he questioned the woman who said she hadn’t heard his instructions. He also inquired about Facebook posts she had made, one of which implied she hadn’t wanted to deal with jury duty.
“So when you got up this morning,” Simms began, “you didn’t think that you had to be here. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said.
“Well, I know you didn’t want to be here yesterday, because you put that on Facebook, right? Right?” the judge continued. “There was another Facebook post that said, ‘You ever drove to work and called [in sick] in the parking lot?’ And you said, ‘Hell, yeah.’ Now that makes me think that you are calling off on jury duty.”
“No, sir,” came the reply.
Simms acknowledged the woman’s hearing problem and asked her what she thought she was supposed to do after being chosen for the jury on Monday evening.
“To call in today ... after 5:30,” the woman said, though it was unclear what she meant, claiming that a court clerk had told her that.
“So you heard that, but you didn’t hear me when I went [into the jury room] and said be back at 9:30 [in the morning]?” Simms asked.
“No, sir, I didn’t,” the woman replied. “Because ... when you talk soft, I can’t understand it.”
“I’ve never been accused of talking soft,” the judge said.
The woman was soon dismissed from the jury.
That, coupled with the juror with the heart condition and other matters, left no alternate jurors and therefore not enough panelists to go on.
“I’m gonna try (another case) this week,” Simms said, “but it won’t be this one.”
The true cost of the delay
What happened next drew a curtain on the out-of-court antics and served as a reminder of the stakes, the true cost of the day’s jury-related high jinks.
Kendrick’s lawyer, Floyd M. Buford Jr., asked the judge to set a reasonable bond, to let Kendrick go home under home confinement.
“My client has been incarcerated in the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center since on or around Aug. 31, 2018. That’s two and a half years,” Buford said. “He’s been sitting there waiting for this day, and now he won’t be able to because we don’t have enough jurors. ... I don’t think I’ve ever had a client that’s waited that long.”
The judge denied the motion, citing the severity of the charges in the two separate slayings.
“Mr. Buford, I understand the position that you’re in. We tried to make Mr. Kendrick’s the first case out of the chute,” the judge said as jurors sat out of earshot in an adjoining deliberation room they now will never use. “But that didn’t work out. Not due to the fault of anyone now in the room. ... That blame lies with somebody in another room.”