Woman on D.C. Jury Knew Defendant, Wife
By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Lamiek Fortson wasn't liking his chances in D.C. Superior Court.
He was about to go on trial, accused of killing a man over a dice game, and was looking at a lifetime behind bars. Then, out of nowhere, came a wink from across the courtroom, from a long-forgotten face among the prospective jurors.
It was, investigators say, the beginning of a brazen effort to thwart the prosecution, a plot that has implicated Fortson, his wife, a fellow jail inmate and the winking juror in allegedly trying to sabotage the case. Even Fortson's original defense attorney has been caught up in the turmoil.
From rigging the first trial, which ended in a hung jury, to plotting the killing of a key witness before the retrial, which ended last week in a conviction, Fortson was not, prosecutors say, going down without a fight.
No one, in the end, did more to bring down Fortson, 28, than his wife, the woman he had called a "true soldier," confident that she would never betray him. Ultimately, Erica Williams, 27, deserted her husband for a deal with the government and testified against the father of her three children at his retrial.
Williams's testimony provided a vivid account of how Fortson's first trial became derailed. It was backed by recordings of telephone conversations with her husband from the D.C. jail complex; the Corrections Department routinely records inmates' calls.
The sight of his wife, uncomfortable but unwavering on the witness stand, implicating Fortson in a murder, itself seemed almost an indictment of how wrong things went June 28, 2002, in the alley behind 1647 Holbrook St. NE.
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It was there, in the Trinidad neighborhood, that Gerald Lee Whitfield was killed by Fortson and Fortson's friend Harry Ellis, prosecutors said. Beaten and kicked to death in an attack that might have lasted as long as a half-hour, Whitfield, 27, was unrecognizable even to his mother, who could identify him only by a tattoo.
Ellis, now 29, was identified almost immediately by a witness as one of the assailants. Fortson was identified by another eyewitness. But that did not happen until August 2003, and it was another couple of months before Fortson joined Ellis in custody.
When the case was called for trial last May, it looked promising for the prosecution. Along with the two eyewitnesses, prosecutors said, they had found Fortson's blood at the crime scene. Soon after the slaying, police had also recovered Ellis's car, which matched the description of the car seen leaving the alley and in which investigators found Fortson's blood, Whitfield's blood and a shirt with Whitfield's blood.
Then the jury selection began -- and in walked Jovanda Blackson.
A mother of three with a job at George Washington University and no history of trouble with the law, Blackson was randomly called for jury service. It was sheer coincidence that put her in the courtroom of Judge Erik P. Christian on May 2.
She had ample reason to be excused from the jury. She knew Fortson and Williams from their days as students at Browne Junior High School in Northeast. She did not alert the judge to the connection, despite being asked whether she knew either defendant. Nor did she disclose that two of her relatives had been jailed for murder, which also could have disqualified her.
It is often said that the District is more small town than big city, where people's paths often cross, particularly among those whose roots here go back generations. So coincidences such as the one that put Blackson, Fortson and Williams at Superior Court that day are not all that surprising.
But what allegedly happened once the three of them were there is what has surprised some prosecutors, leaving them to wonder how often their cases could be compromised by concealed relationships.
Blackson saw Fortson in court that day and winked, prosecutors said. He saw her, too. During a break in jury selection, Blackson and Williams found each other in a restroom at the courthouse, prosecutors said.
According to court testimony, an obstruction-of-justice indictment and the recorded jail conversations, this is what happened next:
"She told me she got us. . . . She was going to help," Williams testified. "She said it was a blessing from God."
When they spoke that night by phone, Williams and Fortson recounted the day's fortuitous turn of events in a crude code that did little to cover their tracks.
"I knew that God was going to make a way somehow," Fortson told his wife. "I just didn't know how He was going to do it."
He did not refer to Blackson by name but said: "I saw her in there. I already knew she knew what time it was."
"And she was looking at you," Williams said. "So you looked at her?"
"Right," Fortson answered.
"Oh, okay," Williams said. "Then she winked her eye?"
Hoping to make sure she stayed on the jury, Blackson gave Williams her juror number, and Williams in turn provided it to Douglas Evans, her husband's attorney, Williams testified. Evans has not been charged with wrongdoing.
"I told him I may know someone on the jury," Williams testified.
It was not the last time Williams and Blackson would talk, nor was it the last time Evans would hear of their communications. A few days later, Blackson gave Williams a phone number, Williams testified. The number belonged to a friend, all the better to conceal the contact between Blackson and Williams, according to the indictment.
Williams again went to Evans, who told her she should use only pay phones to talk to Blackson, Williams testified.
Over the next several days, the two women talked frequently, according to the indictment. Blackson would relay questions surfacing among jurors, and Williams, in consultation with Fortson, would suggest ways to steer the jury toward an acquittal or mistrial.
And, on several occasions, the indictment charges, Evans asked Williams to call Blackson to see how the trial was going. It wound up going almost as well as could be hoped.
Allegedly hung up by Blackson, the jury deadlocked, and a mistrial was declared. It wasn't the acquittal that Fortson had wanted, but it was the next best thing, and with the prosecution's strategy no longer a secret, Fortson's defense would stand a better chance the next time.
"They used everything they got," he told Williams in a phone call hours after the mistrial had been declared. "That's all they got. We got, we got a trump card."
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The plot was about to unravel, prosecutors said.
During deliberations, Blackson said something that suggested that she knew Fortson, and a fellow juror asked Blackson whether she had brought that to the judge's attention, according to prosecutors. But Blackson ignored the inquiry.
After the mistrial, a juror mentioned the issue to Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann M. Carroll, the prosecutor in the original trial.
But it seemed more suspicion than substance, and nothing came of it until a phone call several weeks later from an inmate at the jail with intriguing information about the trial. Fortson, the inmate said, had been bragging about how he had orchestrated a mistrial with the help of his wife, conferring with her each night by phone.
Now investigators had more than ample reason to be suspicious, so they started collecting the recordings of Fortson's telephone conversations with his wife.
Fortson, meanwhile, was trying to fix his upcoming retrial, prosecutors say. Fortson was worried about a prosecution witness who placed him at the scene, the informant said. Hoping to have the witness killed, Fortson enlisted the help of an inmate who was about to be released, the informant told authorities.
With so many developments, the prosecution fanned out: Fortson, Williams and Blackson were indicted in August on charges of obstruction of justice. Fortson and the other inmate allegedly involved in the plot were charged in the fall with making threats. All are in jail.
Williams pleaded guilty in October to the obstruction charge and is awaiting sentencing.
Blackson, who is 27 and moved from the District to Suitland soon after the first trial, has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney, Nikki Lotze, has said in court that Blackson could have been the victim of jury tampering, intimidated by an old acquaintance. At her attorney's request, Blackson has been undergoing mental health evaluations.
Evans has denied knowledge or involvement in the alleged jury tampering. After the allegations of jury tampering emerged in August, the prosecutors handling the cases, Carroll and fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Anderson, argued that Evans was "at a minimum" a witness and needed to be taken off the case. The judge agreed and ordered Evans off.
Getting bounced from the case could be the least of Evans's problems. The testimony of Williams and the conduct ascribed to him in the indictment of Blackson and Fortson could lead to an inquiry by the D.C. Bar Counsel, the ethics enforcer for lawyers in the District.
In court and in court papers, Evans's attorney, Veronice A. Holt, has maintained that Evans was not aware of any of the conduct charged against Fortson. The claims by Williams, Holt said last week, sound like the self-serving statements of a defendant looking for a deal. Evans referred questions to Holt.
Whatever the statements might mean for Evans, they certainly didn't help the man he once represented. In the retrial, Fortson was convicted of the most serious charge against him -- first-degree murder. Ellis was convicted of second-degree murder.
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