No verdict yet in ex-officer’s case

Jurors in the Josh Hastings manslaughter trial deliberated about seven hours Saturday without reaching a verdict, prompting Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen to schedule a rare Sunday session beginning at noon today to give the nine women and three men more time to consider a verdict.

Hastings is charged with manslaughter because prosecutors say the former police officer was reckless in confronting and firing into a moving car during a dark pre-dawn encounter in August at a west Little Rock apartment complex, where he had been called with other officers to investigate complaints about vehicle break-ins.

The vehicle was carrying a trio of teenage car burglars, and Hastings’ shots killed the 15-year-old driver, Bobby Joe “Weedy” Moore III. Hastings claimed he had been forced to fire when thecar’s driver ignored his orders to stop and kept moving toward him. Hastings was fired from the Little Rock force and charged over the shooting after a police investigation could not support his version of events, most notably his claim that the car had traveled up onto an embankment. Police found no evidence that had occurred.

Jurors can convict Hastings on the felony count, which carries up to 10 years in prison, reduce the charge to negligent homicide, a misdemeanor with a penalty of at most a year in jail, or they can acquit him.

In his closing arguments, chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson warned jurors against being so blinded by their respect for police that they couldn’t see that Hastings had committed a crime when he shot the teen. A guilty verdict would be good for both the police and public, he said.

“[The defense] is wanting you to just go with the man with the badge … just take the word of the cop and that’s all,”the prosecutor said. “It’s your job to police the police. If we can’t hold police accountable, how can they do their jobs if we don’t know if they’re coming to hurt or help.”

Johnson accused defense attorneys of mounting a “red herring” defense, trying to distract jurors from the 27-year-old Hastings’ wrongdoing by raising meaningless questions about evidence, like a bloody gearshift, and questions about whether Hastings truly feared for his life that night.

He reminded the jurors that Hastings was only arrested after police - his friends - couldn’t find any sign the car had moved like he claimed it had.

“These are his friends out there looking for evidence that what he said happened [had] happened, and they didn’t find it,” the prosecutor told jurors, saying that Hastings was a “grown man confronting a child” when he shot and killed Moore.

He said Hastings was hoping jurors would acquit him by focusing on the dead boy’s bad choices and not Hastings’. Johnson evoked Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” lyric: “How many times must a manturn his head, pretending not to see.”

“What the defense wants you to believe is the victim had it coming,” Johnson said. “They want you to be that man. They want you to close your eyes. This is one of the cases you have to look what’s right dead in the face and not flinch because it’s hard. Don’t pretend Bobby Moore’s life doesn’t matter because you don’t like what he was doing.”

Defense attorney Bill James also asked jurors to reject sentimentality, saying feeling sympathy for a dead teenager is understandable, no matter the circumstances of the death. He said both sides in the shooting made choices that carried them to their fatal encounter.

The boys were motivated by crime, James said, and it is easy to imagine what they would do to keep from getting caught. He compared them to wild bears raiding picnic areas looking for food.

Their denials that Moore tried to run over Hastings are meaningless, the attorney said.

“It doesn’t take a college degree to know you shouldn’t say ‘I am trying to run over cops.’

“They were out breaking the law when the rest of west Little Rock slept. They were committing adult felonies, adult crimes,” James told jurors. “All he was doing was doing his job. They made choices and Josh didn’t get to.”

The judge and attorneys might have some insight into what’s going on with the jury because the panel sent out at least two notes with questions - the first coming about 2 1/2 hours after jurors started deliberations.

The judge and the lawyers conferred in private on the notes and to craft responses to jurors. Court rules typically restrict communication between the court and jurors once deliberations have begun.

A request by a reporter to see the letters was declined although the judge’s staff members said the judge would release them after the trial concludes.