Day 4: Star prosecution witness surprise: Huggins didn’t do it

Solicitor Donna Elder called her star witness, DeAngula “Shante” Montgomery, to the stand during the Jamar Huggins trial.

Huggins was on trial on multiple charges related to an armed invasion that happened nearly two years earlier. Angela Eckler and her 12-year-old daughter had been victimized five days before Christmas in 2012.

Montgomery had already pled guilty to her role in the crime, and to another armed robbery that happened seven days later.

Elder had little choice in calling Montgomery first. There was no DNA evidence, no eyewitness evidence, no phone records — nothing else connecting Huggins to the case.

Montgomery’s statement during questioning was the reason Horry County Police Detective Jonathan Martin secured an arrest warrant for Huggins. She told him Huggins was one of two men who forced their way into the Eckler home with a gun after she’d knocked on the door.

The beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard rested solely on her word.

Elder began by having Montgomery tell the jury she was serving a 10-year sentence for her role in two armed robberies — the maximum penalty was 30 years each — and that she had received no help from the solicitor’s office in exchange for her testimony, according to the court transcript of the trial.

���“One of the armed robberies that you have been convicted for, I want to take you back to the one in December of 2012,” Elder said. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Montgomery answered.

“OK. Do you remember going to a house on Memory Lane?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And tell me about what happened when you went to that house.”

“I can’t really remember.”

“All right. Do you remember giving statements before?”

“No. I’m on medication now. So I don’t … I can’t remember nothing really.”

After a little prompting, Montgomery said she remembered telling a detective that she and two men robbed the Ecklers — but that Huggins was not with them.

“Do you remember telling [the detective] that it was Junk?” Elder asked, using the nickname for Huggins.

“Yeah. I remember the name … but [Huggins] doesn’t look like the same person,” Montgomery answered.

Elder pressed, pushing Montgomery to say she told police Huggins was involved.

She reminded Montgomery that she had described the color of the car, told the detective where he lived, that he had on a mask and was armed with a handgun.

“Most of what I said to the detective was not true because …,” Montgomery said before Elder cut her off.

“OK. What about yesterday?” Elder tried to get Montgomery to say she repeated her claim a day before the trial.

“I don’t even … to tell you the truth I don’t, I can only say who went with me. That’s all I can say,” Montgomery said. “I really can’t even recall that night.”

“But you pled guilty to it?”

“Yes. I pled guilty to it. I was convinced that that was the only deal that I was going to get and if I brought it to trial I can get up to 30 years. So I took the 10.”

The testimony Elder was relying upon — for Montgomery to point out Huggins from the stand — turned into a heated back-and-forth that included more inconsistencies, with Montgomery repeatedly saying Huggins was not involved.

“I told them [Huggins], but it was a lie,” Montgomery said. “We … I didn’t want to say the name that we got [drugs] from, and I still don’t want to say the name.”

John Long, Huggins’ lawyer, had readied a defense that would question Montgomery’s reliability as a witness, given her crack cocaine addiction, maybe point out the holes in her story. After she recanted on the stand, Long settled on one question.

“Ms. Montgomery, this is not the person who went in that home invasion with you, is it?” he said, referring to Huggins.

“No, sir.”

“It is not the person who went in the home invasion with you?” Long repeated for emphasis.

“No, sir.”

“That’s all the questions I have.”

Elder tried again to get Montgomery to say Huggins was the man, but she wouldn’t.

During a break for the jury, Judge Benjamin Culbertson said he knew Elder’s case relied upon Montgomery’s testimony and that a directed verdict — which would have freed Huggins before jury deliberations — was a close call.

Judges are reluctant to stop a trial, even though a directed verdict is allowed, when the prosecution has not presented enough evidence for a jury to be able to reasonably come to a guilty verdict.

Montgomery’s initial statement was enough to meet that standard, if only barely, Culbertson ruled.

Had Culbertson declared the evidence was too weak, Montgomery’s recanting on the stand would have been as pivotal as the moments dramatized in criminal justice shows such as “Law & Order.”

Because Culberton decided not to, the inconsistent story Montgomery told before trial went unexamined.

Elder then called the victim, Angela Eckler, to the stand. She confirmed that she couldn’t identify the men and didn’t see the car they drove.

She called Detective Martin to testify, who confirmed the only reason the investigation turned to Huggins was the initial statement from Montgomery.

On cross examination, Long, Huggins’ attorney, hammered Martin about the lies he told to further the case. Martin explained why a police officer’s lies were sometimes necessary and are protected by the Supreme Court.

Earlier in the trial, those lies had confused Montgomery, causing her to mistakenly believe Martin had presented her with a lineup that already had Huggins’ mugshot circled. Martin had used a “police deception” tactic in the interrogation.

On the stand, Montgomery believed the lineup was about Huggins and other male suspects, but it was actually one that included Montgomery’s mugshot among other women as he tried to trick her into confessing.

Long also pushed Martin about the decision to rely upon Montgomery’s word, knowing she was addicted to crack cocaine.

The detective claimed he didn’t know Montgomery was a “crackhead.”

“Mr. Long wants you to believe that you can’t believe anything [Montgomery] says because he called her an addicted crackhead,” Elder argued during closing arguments. “There is absolutely no evidence, nothing, that she was an addict or that she was a crackhead. … To label her as an addicted crackhead without any evidence to support that is just … not appropriate.”

What the jury didn’t know

There was evidence of Montgomery’s extensive crack cocaine addiction, but it wouldn’t be presented to the jury. When Montgomery recanted her original statement, there was no reason to try to impeach her credibility because suddenly the only evidence linking Huggins to the crime had disappeared.

During the initial interrogation, Montgomery told detective Martin she was ashamed of having traded sex to pay off debts for drugs, how she was afraid her behavior was spiraling out of control and could eventually affect her two young children. She told him she ignored her family when they tried an intervention, how she was scheduled to go into long-term rehab to reclaim her life, how her arrest short-circuited those plans.

Long didn’t want to comment on his trial strategy because the case is pending appeal.

Elder then suggested Montgomery recanted on the stand because she was afraid, though offered no evidence for that theory.

“Don’t you think she has all the incentive and motivation in January of 2013 when she identified Jamar Huggins to tell the truth, when it was fresh in her mind to tell the truth, because lying was certainly not going to help her and lying to a police officer about a felony would have resulted in even more charges,” Elder told the jury.

Long said that was baseless speculation and reminded the jury that the prosecution’s star witness said Huggins was not involved in the home invasion.

“He comes into this courtroom … wearing a cloak of innocence,” Long said. “For him to be proven guilty, the State has to take off that robe of innocence, prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of each and every element of each and every crime. … The testimony you heard can’t get you there from here.”

The jury, Culbertson said, was to consider “only the testimony which has been presented from the witness stand, any exhibits which have been made a part of the record in this case and any stipulations of counsel.”

They could believe all or part of a witness’s testimony, as well as a witness’s bias or credibility.

With that, the jury filed out of the courtroom to begin deliberations.

Decision time

The jury was tasked with a decision that could, in the harshest scenario, lead to the then 32-year-old Huggins being in prison until he was more than 100 years old. A guilty verdict would guarantee at least a 15-year sentence because of mandatory minimums in South Carolina.

They would not be pouring over fingerprints, eyewitness accounts from the victims or results from the touch DNA swabs collected from the scene of the crime — because there was no such evidence.

Neither would they consider phone or text messages linking Huggins to the man, Adrian Moore, police said was the real target of the home invasion — because there were none.

For a variety of legal reasons, strategy chosen by the prosecution and defense and rulings by Judge Culbertson, the jury wouldn’t know that Huggins always maintained his innocence. He turned down several plea offers that would have set him free before court. (About 90 percent of criminal cases end in plea agreements, providing a defendant a shorter sentence but also forever branding him a convicted felon.)

During a phone call from J. Reuben Long Detention Center when he didn’t know he was being recorded, Huggins said Montgomery and a man he knew may have done something and “got his name in it” when they borrowed his car late one night, the same thing he alluded to during an interrogation. He couldn’t be sure because Detective Martin didn’t tell him when or where the home invasion happened.

The jury wouldn’t know that his mother and a family friend said they saw him in his bed the night of the crime, that he was momentarily agitated when they disturbed his sleep after a late night at a Conway Bingo parlor they were known to frequent.

Their decision would rest upon one thing — Montgomery’s word. And they hadn’t even been equipped with a complete view of that.

While testimony revealed that Montgomery had been involved in another armed robbery, neither the prosecution nor the defense explained to the jury that crime was seven days after the home invasion and that she pleaded guilty to luring a man to be robbed by one of the initial suspects in the home invasion.

Her co-defendant in that case was Christopher Jamal Montgomery, who was also charged with three counts of kidnapping, four counts of armed robbery and four counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime when he was accused of pistol-whipping and robbing a disabled man at a Myrtle Beach motel a couple of hours before the Eckler home invasion in Conway. He allegedly stole $190, a digital camera and a cell phone during the armed robbery of a man and woman five days earlier.

Because the prosecution and detective claimed to not know about Montgomery’s significant drug problem, the jury had been led to believe she had used the drug but — as Elder erroneously said during closing arguments — there was “absolutely no evidence” she was a crack addict.

The jury also didn’t know the extent of the inconsistencies in Montgomery’s initial statement, the one that led to Huggins’ prosecution and convinced Culbertson to hand the case to the jury.

All the jury knew was that the woman who on the stand told them Huggins was not involved had previously said he was.

On that amount of information, they were told to make a judgment that could forever alter Huggins’ life or bring justice to the victims.

According to the principals involved in this and other criminal cases — law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, legal analysts — that’s how the system is supposed to work.

It was not an accident the jury was asked to make a decision based on almost no evidence; it was by design.

After about two hours of deliberations, the jury asked Judge Culbertson a single question.

“We want to know the first date the investigator Martin interviewed Ms. Montgomery.”

January 11, 2013, at 9:41 a.m., they were told, about three weeks after the crime.

A little less than two hours later, the jury reached a verdict.

Guilty.

Culbertson thanked then dismissed them before listening to a statement from Huggins’s then 90-year-old grandmother, who pleaded for leniency and said she knew Huggins was innocent, and a letter written by then 12-year-old Mariah Eckler, who urged the judge to give Huggins the maximum.

Elder tried to present what she said was a failed polygraph test by Huggins but admitted that had the results been different she would not have accepted it as proving his innocence. Culbertson disregarded it. (Such tests usually aren’t admissible in court because they are not scientifically reliable. Innocent people who are nervous have failed the test while calm guilty men have passed it. Also, law enforcement officials have sometimes told defendants they’ve failed the test when they’ve actually passed or the results were inconclusive in an attempt to trick them into a confession.)

Huggins lawyer, once again asked Culbertson to intervene because there was such little evidence.

“There is absolutely no evidence for the jury to base their conviction upon,” Long argued.

Culbertson agreed “100 percent” that it was “a close call” and that an appeals court might determine that he committed a legal error.

“I go with the jury’s verdict and … they just believed Ms. Montgomery’s prior statement and didn’t believe her testimony at trial,” Culbertson said while denying Long’s motion. “… All I do is look to see if there is any evidence in the record, and then it’s up to the jury to draw the conclusions they want to draw.”

He sentenced Huggins to the minimum allowed, two 15-year and a 10-year sentence to be served concurrently.

Huggins has been in prison for almost a year, since Sept. 17, 2014.

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 4:27 PM with the headline "Day 4: Star prosecution witness surprise: Huggins didn’t do it."