"Because there is a God, I firmly believe, and I believe there is a God whose business is justice. "I hope that you don't think this is something you have gotten away with," the judge told Davis.
Quarles peered over the top of his wire-rim glasses and addressed the defendant in cadenced tones that conveyed both dismay and menace. In closing remarks in the Davis trial, attorney Jerome Bivens noted that police had mangled evidence, filed incomplete reports, failed to question potential witnesses and had taken nearly an hour to get a homicide team to the scene of the murder, concluding: "We will never know what happened."Īfter the verdict, Judge William D. In a pattern played out in scores of trials over the past five years, defendant Kenneth "Exxon" Davis joined a long list of murder suspects acquitted after defense attorneys argued that police blunders raised doubts about their clients' guilt. One by one, four witnesses put aside their fears of retaliation and came forward to identify his killer in court. Sweet-natured, quick to laugh, he had come of age among them and was forging a path in life that set an example for other kids in a part of the city where hope is hard to hold. Quortez Jackson was beloved by his neighbors. 5, 2000, galvanized a drug-racked neighborhood otherwise numb to the grim pornography of casual, curbside killings - the scattered bullet casings and blood-spattered sidewalks and crumpled teen-age corpses. The daylight murder of the disabled 18-year-old on Aug. In the background, a small child yelped: "He's shot!" The time was 5:55 p.m. "There's a boy laying out here on the ground with his brains out. "I need police and an ambulance!" one of the neighbors screamed moments later in a call to the city's 911 center. As the picture makes perfectly clear, he was all but defenseless when he was executed two summers ago on the doorstep of his mother's Cherry Hill townhouse. In the crime scene photo, the fingers on Jackson's left hand are little more than stumps, fused together from a birth defect.
On the right side of his forehead, just above his eye, there is a black hole, the charred signature of a point-blank. The winsome ear-to-ear grin hangs slack at the corners. His eyes - his pretty, almost girlish, brown eyes - are half closed. In one of the last pictures ever taken of him, Quortez Jackson looks sleepy.