Jury acquits North Little Rock parolee in killing of Arkansas teen

A North Little Rock parolee accused of killing a 19-year-old Sherwood man during a holdup was acquitted on Wednesday after a three-day trial.

The nine women and three men of the jury deliberated about 4½ hours to clear 22-year-old Roy Lee Boles Jr. of capital murder, aggravated robbery, first-degree battery and aggravated assault over the February 2016 slaying of 19-year-old Jevon Tyrell Shearer in a North Little Rock shooting that also wounded Shearer's friend. Prosecutors had been seeking a life sentence.

Barely an hour before delivering their verdict, jurors reported they were deadlocked 8-4. They were not allowed to say what verdict they were favoring and the judge urged them to continue their deliberations.

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Boles was found shot in the groin about two blocks away from the shooting. He told police he'd been hit by random gunfire on 19th Street while walking in the neighborhood and denied knowing anything about the shooting at 20th and Parker streets in North Little Rock.

Boles was being railroaded by a police department that had rushed to judgment, defense attorney Cheryl Barnard told jurors.

Investigators ignored at least two other possible suspects, especially the prosecution's star witness; failed to develop the appropriate evidence; and conducted a sloppy investigation to support its wrong-headed conclusion, said Barnard, who was assisted by Lisa Walton-Middleton and David Watford.

"You have the power to say we are not going to tolerate the conviction of an innocent man based on this," Barnard said in her closing argument. "The worst type of bias is what we have here -- when you don't see the evidence because it doesn't fit your beliefs."

Boles, who was on parole for burglary convictions, did not testify, but prosecutors played his police interview for the jury. Barnard said that video was further proof of his innocence, pointing out how Boles, in pain from his wound, never backed down from the "hammering" questioning of Detective Michael Gibbons.

"Roy Boles never wavers from the fact 'I wasn't there,'" Barnard said.

No fingerprints, DNA or video connected Boles to the crime scene. Barnard asked jurors how they could trust an investigation when police couldn't even find the two guns that investigators said were used, one by Boles and the other by Shearer.

"They collected a large amount of evidence, not a bit of it places my client [with Shearer]," she said.

Authorities should have looked more closely at Shearer's friend, Ronald Bernard Cash Jr., instead of making him the star witness, Barnard told jurors. Cash's testimony that Boles set him and Shearer up to be robbed was too fantastical to be believed, she said.

Cash or another man who'd been in the sport utility vehicle earlier, Shaquille Tremaine Mackey, could have been the shooter, she said.

"When it comes down to it, Mr. Cash doesn't know the truth if it bites him on the nose. Ronald Cash had a choice. He could be a victim or a suspect. That's an easy choice," she said. "Mr. Cash has an awful lot to gain from lying. The most he's got to gain is not having the police point the finger at him."

Prosecutors Amanda Fields and Robbie Jones told jurors that logic would lead them to Boles' guilt. Cash told the first police officer on the scene he and Shearer had been shot by a man named Roy, Jones said.

And a man named Roy, who said he knew Shearer, was found wounded two blocks away, yards from a bloody cell phone that had been used to call both Cash and Shearer, Jones told jurors.

The account of the shooting that Cash gave police and told jurors in court also matches the evidence at the scene from the location of the shell casings to the pools of blood police found, Field said.

"How does that happen unless Ronald Cash is telling the truth?" she asked. "For you to believe [Boles] is you willfully not trying to use your common sense."

To believe Boles was the target of a "grand conspiracy" to frame him for murder would require jurors to believe that the 26-year-old Cash is a "mastermind" who killed his friend, hid the guns, then immediately concocted a frame-up after suffering a bone-breaking gunshot wound, Fields said. Then he somehow planted two dozen phone calls between the men's three cell phones, she told jurors.

The only liar is Boles who started out by giving police a fake phone number in the interview, she said.

"He needed to lie about his phone. He knew his number was in Ron Cash's phone. He knew his number was in Jevon Shearer's phone," she told jurors. "There's one person who told lie after lie and that's Roy Boles. Because he knows what he did."

Metro on 06/22/2017

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