A 42-year-old Little Rock man who gunned down a man prosecutors say was trying to apologize for being rude was sentenced to 25 years in prison Wednesday after a two-day trial.
A Pulaski County jury deliberated almost four hours to find Donald Lee Brown guilty of second-degree murder for the September 2016 slaying of Damon Kirk Wilkins in front of Wilkins' southwest Little Rock home.
The seven women and five men spent about an hour to decide his punishment. He faced a maximum of 55 years and will have to serve almost 14 before he can apply for parole.
The finding of the jury was that Brown had engaged in dangerous behavior he knew could be deadly when he shot Wilkins. To reach that decision, jurors rejected the contention by prosecutors that Wilkins' slaying was a calculated capital murder, which carried an automatic life sentence. The jury also bypassed the option to convict him of first-degree murder, which is a deliberate killing.
Brown, who has no prior convictions, did not testify nor call any witnesses in his defense. Asked by Circuit Judge Leon Johnson if he had anything to say before leaving court, Brown denied killing Wilkins and told the judge he did not understand how he could be convicted of a crime with no evidence against him.
"I wasn't even there. I don't even know the guy," he told the judge after the jury had left. "For the record, I just want you to know that I am innocent."
In closing arguments, defense attorney Lott Rolfe IV told jurors that the three eyewitnesses said by police to have seen Wilkins killed -- his girlfriend and two of her teenage children -- could not be believed because of how often their stories changed, even while they were testifying.
"These witnesses over and over again fooled police and fooled prosecutors, and now they are trying to fool you," he said, describing them as "aggressive, combative and deceptive" on the witness stand.
He said their testimony provided no certainty for jurors about who killed Wilkins and why, accusing girlfriend Chamika Rogers and her children with deliberately downplaying Wilkins' aggressive behavior with a gun in a confrontation with another man that preceded his killing by less than an hour.
Rogers has been "working overtime" to frame Brown so jurors will overlook testimony that indicates Brown's 22-year-old nephew could be involved in the killing, Rolfe said. The nephew, Courtney Brown, is the son of Rogers' sister, who is married to Donald Brown's brother.
"Who is she trying to protect here?" he asked, saying Rogers' prior convictions for domestic violence, which included a prison stay, make her accusations that she saw Donald Brown shoot Wilkins especially questionable.
Rolfe also reminded jurors of how Rogers' children acted in court, particularly how the woman's 15-year-old daughter, Chamisha, had cursed another defense attorney with vulgar language while testifying.
Senior deputy prosecutor Leigh Patterson countered that while jurors might not like how the girl and her 14-year-old brother behaved in court, what they had seen was the honest testimony of children traumatized by seeing a man they knew and cared about shot to death in the street in front of their home.
"They're angry and hurt and scared," Patterson said. "You might not like [Chamisha] and you may not like the way she acts. But she is what she is, and she saw what she saw."
Their testimony, along with their mother's account, explains why police found 14 bullet casings in front of the home at Fairfield Drive and Chicot Road that they had shared with Wilkins, Patterson said. All three had also described seeing a heavyset man known only as "Dough Boy" give Brown a gun before both men shot Wilkins down, she said. That second man has not been charged in the case.
And the children's testimony explains what Wilkins was doing when he was killed, trying to make amends for his dispute with Courtney Brown by apologizing to the 22-year-old man's mother, Chamika Rogers' sister Tanya Brown, the prosecutor said. According to witnesses, Tanya Brown was at the scene in a pickup receiving an apology from Wilkins when he was shot down.
Wilkins might have been unsavory, the prosecutor said. But he had done nothing to earn 11 bullets, with nine of them fired into his back with "laser focus," Patterson told jurors after counting off every wound on the dead man's body and each of the casings police recovered.
"You might not like what he was doing and you might not like how he was acting. But that was his life," she said. "The evidence in the street matches what they say. [Wilkins] was running from what Donald Brown brought to him."
Each of the bullets fired into the man's body, piercing his heart, his lungs, his liver and his intestines, is proof of of how much Brown wanted Wilkins' dead, and that is capital murder, the prosecutor said. Wilkins' dispute might have started with Courtney Brown but his uncle, Donald Brown, chose to make it his fight, she told jurors.
"This might have been barely his fight. But he wanted it to be," she said. "He wanted to pull the trigger and so he did."
Metro on 10/05/2017