Lee Anthony Evans
On hiring a good attorney, onetime barrister Abraham Lincoln once said: “He who represents himself has a fool for a client.” Well, Abe might have been honest, but he wasn’t always right. And Lee Anthony Evans is no fool.
The 58-year-old Newark, N.J., brickmason has been acquitted in the 1978 murder of five teenagers in a case that went unsolved for a generation and bewildered the city. “It’s a situation where I heard them say not guilty, but the way they put a horrible thing on you, you still feel guilty, ” he told the New Jersey Star-Ledger on Wednesday.
That Evans was acquitted in the case, however, is not as remarkable as the fact that he successfully defended himself, proving that the testimony against him was not plausible.
Prosecutors claimed that Evans murdered the teens by locking them in an abandoned home and setting it on fire. They said he did it in retaliation for the boys stealing marijuana from him a few days earlier. The bodies of the teenagers were never found, and the homicides remained a cold case for decades. It was classified as a missing persons case until two detectives, always haunted by what happened, decided to reopen it in 2008.
That’s when Evans’s cousin, Philander Hampton, 54 — a career criminal seeking a plea deal in exchange for a 10-year jail term and $15,000 in relocation money — confessed to the crime, telling authorities that he helped Evans trap the teens. Hampton testified that the boys, who often did odd jobs for Evans, had come to the house thinking they would be moving boxes and instead were sealed in a closet, after which Evans poured gasoline around the house and lit it with a match, torching the home.
But since there were no bodies and no DNA evidence linking Evans to the crime, the testimony was already deemed questionable. Evans and attorney Bukie Adetula, who helped him prepare his defense, pointed out Hampton’s long criminal record — he had already done 10 years in prison for robbery and admitted on the stand that he had been a heroin addict, who also sold dope out of the house where the crime supposedly took place.
Hampton’s testimony during the trial was so inconsistent that, despite needing assistance with questioning, Evans was able to convince a jury in his final arguments that Hampton was not a credible witness.
Evans, who always maintained his innocence and had earlier accused Essex County district attorneys and Newark Mayor Cory Booker of corruption, said he was still anguished over the accusation. “It’s like someone put you in the oven and burned you up. You can’t undo that.”
Harold J. Stewart
It's an axiom known by every lawyer and judge in every courthouse in the land: A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.Try telling that to Harold J. Stewart.
Stewart, a 42-year-old high school dropout, defended himself in a murder case in Prince George's County, where he was accused of beating a sleeping man to death with a baseball bat.
The trial lasted three days. Stewart called no witnesses. The jury deliberated less than an hour.
The verdict: Not guilty of first-degree murder. Not guilty of second-degree murder.
"Everybody told me I was crazy to represent myself," Stewart said in an interview. "I had no choice. They were obstructing my rights."
The obstructionists, in Stewart's view, included county prosecutors, the trial judge, the assistant public defender who represented him at his first trial (which ended in a mistrial), the private defense lawyer who represented him between the two trials, jail officials he says unfairly denied him access to the law library and the state Attorney Grievance Commission.
Victories such as Stewart's are exceedingly rare. Veteran attorneys in suburban Maryland and the District said they had never heard of a pro se defendant -- a term that draws on the Latin phrase meaning "on one's own behalf" -- winning an acquittal in a murder case.
"Oh, wow," Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy said when told of the case. McCarthy said he was not aware of a pro se defendant in Montgomery winning an acquittal in a serious felony in his 27 years as a prosecutor there.
"We certainly have had pro se defendants win trials on charges like drunk driving or disorderly conduct," McCarthy said. "It's the kind of thing your colleagues generally tease you about."
Circuit Court Judge Vincent J. Femia, a judge or prosecutor in Prince George's for 47 years, said he, too, had never heard of such an outcome in a murder case. Regarding the quick acquittal, Femia said, "It would make you wonder about the quality of the case, if a guy who knew nothing about the law could kick your [expletive]."
Through his spokesman, State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey declined to comment on the case. Assistant State's Attorneys Mary K. Brennan and Dorothy Engel, who prosecuted the case, also declined to comment.
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