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Jury deliberations to continue today
YOUNGSTOWN
The jury will resume deliberations at 9 a.m. today in the capital murder trial of Lorenza Barnette in an Aug. 11, 2009, double- suffocation slaying.
Jurors began their deliberations Tuesday afternoon and were sequestered overnight in a local hotel.
The trial, in which opening statements were made Oct. 4, is before Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
Barnette, 29, of Lora Avenue, and two other men were charged with aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, kidnapping and arson in the deaths of Jaron L. Roland, 20, of Fairmont Avenue, and his cousin, Darry B. Woods-Burt Jr., 19, of the city’s North Side.
Barnette’s co-defendants, Kenneth Moncrief, 26, of Fairgreen Avenue, and Joseph Moreland, 28, of Mahoning County jail, who also face the death penalty, will have jury trials at a later date, also before Judge Sweeney.
“These two boys were executed by their own group of friends,” Dawn Cantalamessa, an assistant county prosecutor, said of the victims in her closing argument Tuesday morning.
The defendants delivered “their own kind of justice — street justice” as the victims struggled and pleaded for their lives while their heads were being encased in plastic bags and duct tape, Cantalamessa said.
The defendants killed the two men because they believed Woods was “a snitch,” who was giving information to a rival gang on the East Side, she said.
Cantalamessa summarized the prosecution’s case, referring to discount store security video and a cash-register tape showing Barnette buying plastic bags, duct tape and lighter fluid less than 90 minutes before the victims were found dead in a burning car off West Avenue by the Mahoning River, without identification, money or cellular phones.
Much of the closing arguments centered on DNA evidence presented by scientists from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation.
Barnette’s DNA was on both victims, Cantalamessa said, citing expert testimony that the chances of that DNA coming from someone else were one in 39 billion. The world’s population is 6.8 billion, Cantalamessa said.
The state’s DNA testing was not done in accordance with FBI standards, and the results were “subjective, speculative and wholly uncertain,” in addition to being incomplete and unfairly interpreted, said Barnette’s lead lawyer, J. Gerald Ingram.
“The fact that Lorenza bought this duct tape doesn’t mean he was aware of its intended purpose,” Ingram said, adding that no fingerprints were found on the duct tape.
Ingram also cited inconsistencies between witness statements to police and their court testimony, and he said jurors should be skeptical about the testimony of prosecution witnesses, who testified in exchange for leniency in other criminal cases in which they were charged.