It was my first time on a jury. I was 31, balancing two jobs while going to graduate school. It was 2009, New Orleans was infested with crime, and I remember feeling like I wanted to be part of justice. During jury selection, the prosecutors asked if I could convict someone based on the testimony of a single eyewitness, and I said, in theory, I could.

It was a very short trial. The victim’s name was Bryant Craig, and a friend of his got on the stand. Four years earlier, they had been driving and almost hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian ended up shooting Craig, and the friend seemed confident it was 17-year-old Kia Stewart. The friend’s story never changed. He didn’t stutter. I thought: If I’d seen my friend murdered, I would remember who I saw do it ...

One day in 2014, I was at my home in the Houston area — where I moved a couple of years after the trial — when I heard a knock at the door. I looked out the window and saw a man and woman. They seemed out of place, and I hid from them. Then my cousin called and said they’d come by earlier trying to track me down. They wanted to talk about my jury service.

I let them in, and they explained they were researchers from Innocence Project New Orleans. There was a problem with Stewart’s conviction, they told me. He was likely innocent.

I had a sunken feeling. They had found other witnesses who had not been presented at trial. The new evidence said Stewart was sleeping at the time of the crime, and a man named Antonio Barnes was the real culprit. (He was later killed while attempting a robbery.) The researchers said my assumptions about the reliability of eyewitnesses were incorrect. When you’re traumatized, like many people who witness a crime, you don’t remember as vividly, they said. And then, when you’re hungry for justice, you think your memory is clearer than it really is.

 

Read the full article about the juror who sent an innocent man to jail by D'Shean Kennedy at The Marshall Project.