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by Val Ellicott
Staff Writer
Even prosecutors didn't think much of the evidence
against Kevin Coleman.
Their key witness - the only person who remembered
seeing Coleman at the Riviera Beach bar where Bobby Roddy was killed
- had given conflicting accounts of the shooting.
More than 15 people said Coleman wasn't at the
murder scene at all.
And one witness said five or six people were
holding guns immediately after the shooting on March 28, 1991.
``This leads to considerable reasonable doubt as to
who was the shooter, '' one prosecutor wrote in a memo.
The chief homicide prosecutor agreed. ``We should
NOT go to trial under any circumstance,'' he advised.
The prosecutors offered Coleman a deal: Plead
guilty to manslaughter in return for a sentence of the 13 months he
had already spent in jail.
Coleman's court-appointed attorney, David
Pleasanton, urged him to take it.
``Kevin was never going to be president of these
United States,'' Pleasanton said. ``Would a guilty plea to
manslaughter have affected his future? It might have, but not that much.''
But Coleman turned the deal down.
``I would have been saying I killed somebody, and I
didn't,'' he said.
Coleman bet his future on the law, even though he
had spent most of his teen years breaking it by selling drugs on the
streets of Riviera Beach.
That gamble cost him 25 years of his life.
A JURY OF NO PEERS
`If I would have had my way, he would have been put
to death'
Coleman's jury was white, white-collar and
middle-class - three men and three women, with an average age of 52.
Pleasanton knew little more than that about the
jurors when he agreed to seat them. During jury selection, he never
probed deeply into their backgrounds to uncover opinions and
attitudes that might affect their judgment.
``The whole key is you let them talk,'' said
Richard Lubin, a criminal defense lawyer who is considered an expert
in defense strategy. Lubin has handled some of the biggest murder
cases in Palm Beach County.
Instead, Pleasanton did most of the talking, asking
mostly questions that required only yes or no answers.
``Mr. Coleman is black,'' Pleasanton asked. ``He
didn't have any choice in that. Does anybody have a problem with the
fact that he is black?' '
That type of question is meaningless, Lubin said.
``The grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan could be there and he wouldn't
raise his hand.' '
Pleasanton also revealed that Coleman was a drug dealer.
``If you were to learn that somebody sold crack
cocaine - I'm not saying you're going to learn that, but if you . . .
do learn that - do you think necessarily because they sold crack
cocaine and broke the law in that way that the person would be
inclined or tend to commit murder?'' Pleasanton asked.
One juror, John Fitzpatrick, told Pleasanton he
didn't read the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel ``because of their
political views,'' but Pleasanton never asked why.
Had he done so, he might have learned that
Fitzpatrick believes ``you only deserve the defense you can afford.''
Or that Fitzpatrick would be so unsympathetic to
Coleman and his witnesses that he would describe them after the trial
as ``cockroaches.''
Or that Fitzpatrick would see Roddy's murder as
``one crack addict and drug dealer killing another crack addict and
drug dealer.''
``I wish we could have rounded up every one of the
witnesses and had them all in jail,'' Fitzpatrick said in an
interview for this story.
``Personally, if I would have had my way, he
(Coleman) would have been put to death.''
THE TRIAL
Prosecution: Witness saw Coleman
Defense: Coleman wasn't there
Prosecutor Allen Geesey described the killing in
his opening statement on Sept. 9, 1992:
Bobby Roddy was shot once in the back and once in
the side while ``running in terror'' from Roadburners bar. He died on
the street outside. With him was his cousin, Dexter Smith, who also
was shot but lived to identify the gunman.
``He (Smith) didn't know him by name, but he knew
him by face,'' Geesey told jurors.
Smith had recognized the gunman from a
confrontation in 1990 at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. One of Coleman's
friends, Avery Clayton, had pistol-whipped Roddy. Coleman was there,
too, Smith said.
Police put Coleman's picture in a photo lineup.
Without hesitating, Smith pointed to Coleman.
Pleasanton outlined a very different scenario in
his opening statement.
Coleman was 2 miles away when Roddy was killed,
Pleasanton said, and two eyewitnesses would identify the man who
really killed Roddy.
As it turned out, the defense put on only one
eyewitness. The other man wasn't at the murder scene, something
Pleasanton said he didn' t learn until Coleman's trial had already started.
*more: The Prosecution's Bombshell
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