After the clerk read the verdict Ed Boy stood seemingly in disbelief, as if the words hadn’t sunk in, then he cried, then he hugged Assistant Public Defender Courtney Davison, whose closing had very likely sealed it for him. He looked back at his father and other family members in the gallery, beaming. He hugged Assistant Public Defender Melissa Macnicol, his lead attorney about whom he’d written some not too-nice things before the trial.
As the jury filed out, he yelled out his thanks to them, too, then sat, clutching his head in his hands, crying. Then he hugged Assistant Public Defender Spencer O’Neal, who’d walked in to hear the verdict and had been second chair for jury selection.
After a trial of barely three hours, a six-member jury–four women, two men, one Black–took 105 minutes this afternoon to find Edward “Ed Boy” Sampson, 30, not guilty of aggravated battery on a pregnant woman.
It was not a complicated case. The jury had to decide: Did Sampson shove Nicole M. when she was 20-weeks pregnant? And did he know she was pregnant last July 27 as Nicole and her friends were snacking and chatting on a porch in South Bunnell?
On its face, it was not a significant case, either. Battery, even aggravated battery cases don’t generally warrant much attention beyond the courthouse. They carry penalties typically much more severe than actual sentences. When charges aren’t dropped, most end in pleas with probation and some jail time, even when a second-degree felony is, on paper, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. (See: “‘Ed Boy,’ Target of Murderers in a Trial 9 Months Ago, Is Now a Defendant Facing Up to 30 Years Over a Shove.”)
But Sampson is a 15-time convicted felon. The jury knew it: he testified to it when he took the stand this afternoon. The jury did not know that he got out of his fifth prison stint only last May. If convicted on a new felony, he would have been branded a “habitual offender” and a “prison releasee reoffender,” categories written in law to severely harsh up penalties, doubling potential punishments.
The aggravated battery charge is a second-degree felony. Because of his history, a conviction would have doubled his punishment to up to 30 years in prison, with 15 of that mandatory, to be served day for day. Sampson would have been in his mid-40s or 50s before he would have seen another day’s freedom.
It looked like a sure win for the prosecution. There were just three witnesses: Nicole and the two Bunnell cops who handled the case. Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark had her case wrapped up less than two hours into the trial.
He absolutely knew she was pregnant, the prosecutor argued to the jury. He got in Nicole’s face with his 6’3’’ frame, he was talking trash about her uncle, she challenged him, and he shoved her in the face. She almost fell if it weren’t for a chair.
But Nicole’s testimony did not quite help the prosecution. She came across surly and put-off more than hurt, now 35 weeks pregnant with the child she was bearing at the time of the July incident in Bunnell.
Sampson testified in his defense, also not very convincingly or clearly: but for the two cops who briefly testified, and who are trained to speak in whiplash, it was a day for mumbles.
Sampson claimed she’d spat on him and that he’d never meant to shove her. He even doubted he shoved her, even after the jury saw an obstructed video indicating some kind of physical confrontation. But the scene was blocked by a tree, leaving everything behind it in a leafy blur that also, because of the poor quality of the city’s system, skipped unpredictably.
“So you will have to make the determination yourself what that video depicts and what that video does not depict,” Macnicol told the jury in her opening.
That left plenty of room for Sampson to claim that he’d been invited up to the porch by his cousin. It was his cousin’s house, he hung out there every day and he’d been invited for dinner there that evening. He was not out of place.
Nicole disputed that the cousin had invited him up. Sampson was making trouble and she told him to “shut the fuck up.” He got angry and got in her face, she testified. She’d been eating cucumbers, she said, and was yelling at him with a full mouth, so maybe some of the cucumbers got on his face. He claims she intentionally and gutturally spat on him, so to stop the spittle he put his hand in her face, and maybe she fell back.
“I will argue that his version is not credible,” Clark, the prosecutor, told the jury. “Does it make any sense to you that she would purposely spit on him? No.” Not as a much shorter and pregnant woman. Not at an “enraged” man towering over her.
But of course she’d spit on him, Davison argued back. “It does make sense because at this point, she started the whole thing,” she said. “She took it upon herself to start this heated exchange at that point in time” by telling him to “shut the fuck up,” and by herself getting up first, as she testified. “She told you herself. She stood up as I indicated. Soon as I got up here, she postured first.”
It became not so much a he-said-she-said duel, but a duel between the attorneys. “So notice the thing here, her version is that she didn’t do it intentionally,” Davison said. “My client said he didn’t do it intentionally. So that’s what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, nothing was intentional on either side.” That, combined with the tree obstructing the video, results in assumptions about what really happened, she said, not reliable evidence.
Sampson had stumbled on the stand, at one point saying he hadn’t even touched Nicole and that his cousin had urged him to join them on the porch, which would have been an odd thing to say to someone in the middle of a heated argument with a guest. So it was Davison who really bailed him out with a conclusion to a closing that must’ve rung in the heads of the jury: “Maybe, possibly, probably, likely: all of those equal a not guilty,” Davison told them.
So it was.
The jury had returned to the courtroom for a question more than halfway through its deliberations, asking to watch the video again, twice. Whatever they saw convinced them.
After the verdict Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, who had presided over the trial, reminded Ed Boy of his recent history with the law.
“I was the one that revoked your probation based on the violation of probation and sentenced you to prison. Do you remember that?” the judge asked Sampson, who just wanted to celebrate and hug everyone. The judge told him he imposed the sentence to be sure that there would be no further probation terms. “Once you got out of prison, you started clean. So I want to remind you that part of the reason, what you told me then, was that it was your intention that you were going to perhaps relocate, that you thought you were going to perhaps get a better job, and you had some prospects in that regard, and you were going to pursue those. I don’t know if you ever did or not, because of the way that turned out. But in some respects, you are now back in the same position you were then, which is a clean slate to move forward. How you move forward is up to you, but I just want to remind you of that conversation that you had with me at the time. Do you remember?”
“Yes, sir,” Sampson told him.
The judge–sitting in as a senior judge for Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols–then adjourned, and a bailiff reminded Sampson by calling out his name like a command that he was still in custody until he was processed out of the county jail later this afternoon, and back to freedom.
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