![]() ![]() Prosecutors are the most powerful people in any courthouse.ĭefense attorneys will tell you they'd rather have a fair prosecutor and an unfair judge than a fair judge and an unfair prosecutor. I'm not sure he fully sees it, but it's true. I ended up spending a bunch of time with Brian Radigan, hanging around while he did his job, in part because I liked him right away, and also because he is one of the most powerful people in the Justice Center. What are you going to do, starts to feel like an answer, rather than an urgent question. When no one feels fully responsible for the outcome, when blame is spread out and diluted, a situation like Da'von's becomes easier to shrug off. Can they help it if people lie or withhold? I get it. Detectives say their information is only as good as what the public coughs up. Prosecutors say they're relying on the detectives. Judges say they can't control what cases the prosecutors bring to them. No one was demanding an inquiry into what went wrong or yowling for reform. But when I asked around the Justice Center about it, people said, yeah, that's a shame. We'll Al Capone him, Brian had said, which is a funny thing for him to say, because Brian looks a lot like a young Al Capone. Brian knows that this guy serving time for something entirely else might be the closest they'll creep towards justice in Aavielle's case, a kind of sideways justice. Last fall, the guy pleaded guilty in those cases to ag robbery and attempted murder, and was sentenced to seventeen years. The guy won't talk, won't talk, won't talk. Twelve years is better than, say, thirty years, right? I'll help you out on a plea if you help us on the Aavielle Wakefield case. Even though these wouldn't normally be cases for Brian's unit since nobody died, Brian prosecutes him, tries to get the guy to cooperate, starts squeezing him. They charge him for the carjacking and for the other shooting. Brian says, can you hurry it up? Chop chop? And they do. Do you know anything about this guy? Funny thing, they said, as a matter of fact, we're looking at him for a carjacking, also for a shooting. The young man in the recording-he sounded involved in some way.īrian called up detectives he knew in the Fourth District. The phone call undid the case against Da'Von, but it also gave Brian new evidence to work with. They decided they couldn't proceed, filed a motion to dismiss. Do we still think Da'Von Holmes is the guy? They weren't sure. They needed to verify that the recording was real, that the people in the call were who they said they were, and that the call itself wasn't theater, manufactured to spring Da'Von. They were only a few weeks from trial at this point. There's a guy out here who says he wants to talk to you. He showed up one day at the Justice Center, took the elevator up to the ninth floor to the lobby of the prosecutor's office. ![]() And Brian told me, the landscaper-he came to them. The landscaper came off as genuine, believable. The landscaper, remember, was the guy who finally chose Da'Von's picture out of a photo array third time around, almost two months after the shooting.Īs I thought, it was the landscaper's ID that made the prosecutors feel comfortable, like they were looking at the right person. ![]() Again, a statement Da'Von told me he'd never made. They also had his statement to the detectives in which he said he'd been up the street at the Family Dollar when it happened. On Da'Von, they also had his cell phone records putting him in the neighborhood at the time-his own neighborhood. Brian's office was also looking into the guy Aavielle's father thought was responsible for the shooting,, but they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with anything. They had the jailhouse statement from that guy who I'm calling John, the guy who'd known Da'Von since he was little-their brothers were friends.īrian told me more about what John said, but he also told me they didn't really find it credible since some of the other people John had mentioned in his statement didn't seem to have a connection to Da'Von. But Brian said he was hoping to persuade one or two of those people to become witnesses by the time the trial rolled around. ![]()
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