A Pulaski County jury on Thursday took only 23 minutes to convict a Little Rock man of capital murder for killing his roommate in a shooting sparked by an argument that prosecutors said was "so trivial and so stupid" that jurors might not believe it.
Circuit Judge Barry Sims imposed the automatic life sentence for 36-year-old Ronnie Collins for the May 2015 slaying of Jonathan Edward Brown, 33, at the South Valentine Road home where Brown was a resident and Collins an occasional guest.
Defense attorneys derided the case against Collins as spectacularly unfair, claiming that police rushed to arrest Collins based on the flimsy stories of another tenant and Collins' girlfriend.
Prosecutors compounded the investigative errors by failing to call all of the necessary witnesses and holding back evidence implicating their own witness, the third roommate, defense attorney Cheryl Barnard told jurors.
[HOMICIDE MAP: Interactive map of Little Rock’s 2015 killings]
"That's not Lady Justice being blindfolded," she said in her closing arguments. "That's putting blinders on the jury."
Larry Bailey, the registered tenant of the home, had a practice of taking in men who might otherwise be homeless, prosecutors said. Collins occasionally lived at the house, sleeping on a pallet in the kitchen.
Brown had been living with Bailey for months, paying a small stipend to Bailey from the landscaping work Bailey had helped arrange for him.
With no DNA or fingerprints to tie Collins to the slaying, prosecutors based their case on the testimony of Bailey and Lakessha Jackson, Collins' girlfriend at the time.
Bailey told jurors he'd seen Collins shoot Brown after an argument between the men about Collins waking Brown up by turning on a light. Bailey said he went to a neighboring home to call police where he saw Collins, still carrying the weapon, go back inside his home. Bailey told jurors he heard a fourth gunshot and then saw Collins leave again.
Jackson testified that Collins had been sleeping with a .45-caliber pistol on his chest, saying she'd moved the gun so she could sleep next to him. She said Collins and Brown had argued while Brown was in the living room and Collins was with her in the kitchen.
Collins took the weapon and rushed into the living room, then she heard three shots, she said. She and Collins left the house separately but met up later that morning to eat breakfast together at a homeless shelter.
"It's hard to believe something so trivial and so stupid caused one person to take another person's life," deputy prosecutor Amanda Fields told jurors, acknowledging that Bailey and Jackson are "not the most sophisticated people."
"But I believe they are honest people," she said. "Larry and Lakessha know what they're talking about ... because they were there."
To discount their stories and how their accounts mesh, jurors would have to believe Bailey and Jackson somehow got together just after the slaying and put together a story they could still stick to after 2½ years, she said.
Brown was killed with a .45-caliber weapon, and the separate accounts by Bailey and Jackson perfectly complement the physical evidence, from the location of the spent shell casings, to the caliber of bullets used to the discovery of a bag full of ammunition, chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson told jurors.
"The good thing about the physical evidence is it can't lie and it can't change," he said.
Metro on 10/27/2017