Episode 6: The Verdict

Pushkin previously on Deep Cover.

Now, in a criminal case, the prosecution side of the story, they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. As to the defense side of the story, we just have to create reasonable doubt. But we did way more than that.

I felt like I had to go to.

Trial every day and I feel like I had to find truthful, not only for the family, for my mom.

People don't understand. It's not TV that it's cut and everybody's happy. There is a life after a case, and people have to live the rest of their lives dealing with the murderer, his family, his friends, his associates.

They're going to have to look.

Behind their back for the rest of their lives.

In May of two thousand and eight, the trial for the murder of Iran Wood was in full swing and Tyrone would Iran's youngest brother. He had a front row seat for it all, including a view of the defendant, Tom Guybison.

I had to see this guy, and then you know, I'm thinking, I know you did it, and you wanted to meet Jamaica one day and that's Beyrd, I mean man.

Then after that, because I know you did you killed my brother.

So at least Tyrone didn't have to face this alone.

I always had someone with me, whether it was my brother, my uncle, one of my uncle's friends.

I was never, like ever, completely by myself.

For years, the story of Iran Wood and his mysterious murder had been a largely private affair for the Wood family. The grief, the uncertainty, and the hope for justice had been theirs alone. But that had changed. Newspapers printed blow by blow coverage of the trial for weeks. It was a gripping drama playing out in real time. So many people were following the story.

Now.

One of them was Tyrone's boss. Usually he was a man of few words, not the expressive type, but apparently he felt compelled to say something.

He said Wow. I said, wow, what did you say? Wild for?

And him and I are not close, and he said, I couldn't believe that you went through that because he saw it in he was watching the news and he was blown away because he never knew.

And I tell people all the time, everybody got a story. I don't want. Nobody had my story.

Well of a suddenly being killed, but everybody has the story.

For the Wood family, this ordeal, which had shaped their lives for almost two decades, was maybe, just maybe coming to a close. Both sides made their closing arguments, then at last it was time for the jury to deliberate. It would be up to them to pass judgment and render a verdict. Turns out things got pretty heated in that jury room. The whole process was fraud. But in the end they did reach a verdict. It just wasn't the verdict that anyone, either the defense or the prosecution,

Okay, my name is Bob. I'm a Philadelphian and I was selected to serve on the jury that heard the case of Thomas Guibison.

To protect his privacy, I'm not going to use Bob's last name, but I can tell you Bob is a science nerd and that informs his outlook on life.

Being trained as a scientist, I would say, yeah, logic was a big part at or at least seriously questioning things, and you know what's proof and what's not proof. You know, where is their doubt, what degree of doubt is there in things?

So in many ways, Bob is kind of an ideal juror. He's been selected to sit on six juries for this trial. Mike Ferrell, the defense lawyer, questioned potential jurors about their sense of fairness. He asked Bob point blank if he could set aside whatever biases he might have about someone being a skinhead.

And my response was, I wouldn't make any presumption on that. I would listen to the testimony and I would decide according to this specific facts of the specific case.

Bob was selected to be on the jury in this case along with eleven others, Four of them were black, eight of them were white. Tom Guybison was facing four charges, a weapon charge, conspiracy to commit murder, murder in the first degree, and finally ethnic intimidation. That last one is basically what Pennsylvania calls a hate crime. As I see it, there were two fundamental questions that the jury was facing.

I don't remember anything specifically about their testimony that I thought that that doesn't ring true. Or I really have doubts about that. I thought they made credible witnesses.

And he felt the same way about Craig. Thought he seemed credible. But here's the thing, says Bob.

Somebody can be credible about something that happened twenty years ago and not remember it completely correct.

Bob said, case in point was the very conversation that he and I were having.

Now, I'm trying to remember fifteen years ago what I experienced on a trial. I can't remember a lot of it.

Bob told me some things he remembered very well, specific moments in the trial, feelings, he had parts of conversations that took place, but other details escaped him, or maybe he recalled them hazily, not in the way that he could trust. And this, right here was the problem for Bob. He told me it was entirely possible that Craig was

I definitely did have some doubts, yeah, absolutely, but I wanted to discuss them. I wanted to hear what other people had to say because they might alleviate my doubts.

So when the jury gathered behind closed doors, Bob expressed his doubts. He just laid them all out.

They might have even killed someone, but it might not have been on that day and at that time, because there was you know, there was there were possible recollection issues, and that I thought that the location description, the date and the dayton time that they came to the city were wobbly, and the description of how they got where they got.

When you start voicing your doubts to your fellow jurors, what do they say back?

Various jurors, you know, are quiet, Some of them just take it in. A couple of other people started to say the same thing. Is this timeline, you know, something we can rely on, and the location something we can rely on. Do we really know that that's where they wound up and that they killed you know, Aron Wood, I don't know.

Back in two thousand and six, when the Philly PD first started searching for a potential victim, they looked at all the unsolved murders. From January through May of nineteen eighty nine, there were thirty seven of them. Then they narrowed down the pool of possibilities by considering several key details that Craig remembered. These details included the general location of the crime, the type of weapon, and the nature of the wound a single shot to the head. They

If we convict somebody a murder, so we have to convict him of murdering a specific That's now that sounds like a weird question to ask, right, But that's where we got to in the discussions, Like we even believed they came here to kill somebody, and they might have killed somebody, we're just not convinced that's who they killed.

If they did kill somebody, and what did the judge say?

The judge essentially, you know, stated the law as the law. But the bottom line was, if you convict someone of a murder, it must be a specific person that they killed. It you have to convict them of.

Let me ask you a question. If the judge had come back and told you you can, you can make a murder conviction even if you don't think it was would.

Yes, how would you what I have voted? I believe I would have voted guilty on that.

By the third day of deliberations, the mood in the jury room was tense.

I was tired. I was thinking about this all the time, even when I wasn't in there. It's difficult to be put in this situation, to know there was a victim, even the idea that you know, the family, you know, might be looking foreclosure on this and want somebody that's you know, guilty of it. But I haven't been given the evidence to be able to do that.

Bob says from the start of the trial, he was determined to hear all the evidence, all the testimony, and keep an open mind, to focus on the facts, to avoid making leaps of logic, and when necessary, to question his own thinking. And now his doubts took cold.

I teared up when I was talking to the other drawers. I was, you know, we were kind of wrung out. He kept asking himself, Am I seeing it the right way? Is there something I'm missing? Is it a moral failing of mind that I'm not willing to make the jump because I think it's shaky, Or am I on the right moral side of the question because I actually have doubts. In a series of doubts and I, you know, I can't make the leap that does that make me weak? I don't know. All I can do is be true

Well, all these years later, it's still yeah.

It was really hard.

As deliberations wore on, it seemed like the jury was starting to unravel. If there is any hope of a resolution, it fell upon this person. I'd like to think of myself as even keeled, and I think that's that's probably why I took a lead role on the jury. This is the jury's foreman. I'm not using his real name. We decided to call him Nick in our interview as foreman Nick. He's the guy who had to read the verdict,

Pressure was growing within the group to come to a conclusion. There was a feeling of we don't have more to go on.

At this point, They've been over the testimony again and again, they'd asked for guidance from the judge, and now they had to start making choices based on my conversations with the jurors and news coverage from the time. It seems like the jury divided into three camps. First, there was the guilty camp. They were convinced by the prosecution's argument and we're basically ready to convict Tom Gobison on all counts, including the murder of iron Wood. According to Nick, the foreman,

There was a sense Tuesday morning that we were out of time. Essentially, there was no more persuasion to happen. We'd all, you know, made our cases based on notes, based on recollection, based on feelings, and the holdout was not budgeing.

How do you navigate out of that situation.

So we negotiated.

Just to be clear here, when he says they negotiated, he's talking about the charges brought against Tom, like, could they reach a compromise. As the foreman of the jury, Nick was in a tricky spot because he thought what the prosecution argued was in fact true. He found Craig believable, he found Craig's detailed memories credible. But as foreman, he was also trying to build consensus and avoid a hung jury.

Yeah, that's exactly what the conversation was, and I think enough people felt strongly that he should go to to prison for some of this.

Ultimately, after three days of deliberations, the jury sent word they were done. All that was left to do was file back into the courtroom and tell everyone what they decided. That's after the break. Mike Ferrell, the defense lawyer, remembers getting the call that the jury had reached a verdict.

In the life of the trial lawyer, there is no time that in any way comes close to the apprehension when you know the jury has a verdict but you haven't heard it yet.

With growing anticipation, he made his way back to the courtroom.

I remember distinctly having to get on an elevator, hide up an elevator multiple floors.

In the courtroom, everyone was there, the prosecutor, Roger King, members of iron Woods family, the jury, the press, and of course Tom Guybison. The judge called the room to attention. Nick the foreman of the jury, rose to his feet and prepared to read the verdict.

It's incredibly surreal standing in a room with someone who's being accused of, you know, cold blooded murder, you know, believing that he did it, being convinced I should say that that he was the one who did these things, and knowing that he's going to look me directly in the eye. It was just incredibly surreal, and I just took a breath and reminded myself this was real life, and then read the read the results.

The charges were read aloud one final time before the jury delivered their verdict.

The court officer then reads the charge to the first charge, the murder of our Wood. How do you find the defendant and the jury says not guilty, and that not is a you know, a glorious moment in the life of.

A trial, or.

What goes through your mind at that moment when you hear that.

Justice has been done.

The jury acquitted him a first degree murder and of ethnic intimidation too. But there was more to the verdict. The jury did find Tom Guybison guilty on the two lesser charges, conspiracy to commit murder and carrying a firearm without a license, crimes that could land time in prison for years. That was the compromise, the deal the jury had struck uck. When this hit the papers, the Philadelphia

We were in quote the first work.

I guess come to minds what my uncle said, because I was basically speechless.

Uh, he said, travesty.

That's Tyrone Wood, Iran's youngest brother. Much like Nick, the foreman of the jury, Tyrone believed Greig's testimony, believed in the integrity of his memory, and felt that there should have been a murder conviction.

Murder is murder. The guy that drove him testified that he done it. He did it, We drove I drove him. There he shot the black man.

At some point, according to a press account, Roger King, the prosecutor, gathered members of the Wood family into his side room and told them, don't try to make any sense out of it now. There is an impossible task. It had been almost twenty years since Iran Wood had died, and during this time, this is what the Wood family had tried to do. Makes sense out of it, understand how and why Iran had died, and hope for closure.

I thought it was the best we could do, and that did not feel great. There was no way to feel one hundred percent about it. When you're you're negotiating on something you believed to be.

True, Does that mean that you feel that basically like he got off. He got away with murder in the sense that he got off on a murder charge that you felt he deserved.

To be convicted of. That's correct.

Long after I talked with Nick, his words lingered in my mind. You're negotiating on something that you believed to be true. But how do you barter with the truth, Because at the end of the day, the truth is supposed to be singular, non negotiable. But it seemed like in this case, perhaps the truth and justice, or at least the justice that was possible, were two separate things,

I felt so strongly that we had the right person and the right victim connected. But that's what happens in a case where I have to accept whatever the jury delivers. It doesn't tell me if I did enough or didn't do enough. I don't go down that rabbit hole.

I can't.

I can what if everything to death.

Scott says that he felt a sense of relief when it was all over, a sense of vindication that justice was in fact served because Tom had found guilty on some counts and he'd been sent to prison. I asked Scott how he felt now about Craig Peterson and whether he thinks Craig got the justice he deserved. I mean, he may not have pulled the trigger, but if he is to be believed, he conspired to murder an innocent man, and he walked away Scott free. How do you.

Process that?

I process it in a way that what's the alternative? If we did not give Craig what I think was required of us, There'd be nothing. There would be no justice to the family, there would be no investigation. It would have stopped, it would have closed, and I'd be left just wondering did we do enough.

I hear you saying that this was a kind of a necessary compromise to make this thing work. But it is a necessary compromise that sits well with you.

When it is your only option. Yes, when it's your only option. It is something that has to sit not comfortable, but it is something you must accept as part of our justice system.

Scott's partner, Terry Mortimer, told me that he felt proud of the work that he and Scott had done, but he also noted that when the verdict came out, this bizarre split verdict as the papers called it, he got grief for it, even from his own colleagues.

I remember talking to a superior who seemed a little upset that he didn't get the full homicide conviction and kind of like, yeah, but you only got a conspiracy. Man, what happened? Like, what happened to you guys? I'm like, hey, man, we did the best we could. I mean, it's we're not we weren't on the jury.

Terry says that before the verdict came down, his boss wanted to issue a press release, make a big deal out of the whole thing, but that never happened.

It seemed disappointed. It was like the case was never mentioned again. It was like it was like almost like it didn't happen.

And then there's the Wood family. When I spoke with them, I could see how Iran's death had shaped their lives in so many ways. It almost pulled them under not once but twice, first back in nineteen eighty nine when Iran was murdered, and then again in two thousand and eight at the trial. Michael, the middle brother, told me that the trial forced him to come to terms with what he'd been grappling with for years.

Now you're facing you're really facing your enemy, that this person that killed you both. Do you really forgive this person. I've learned to forgive this person. They'd killed my brother, I say, and now that I'm facing to see who this person is, I forgave him already.

There's nothing really I can do about it, you know.

In the end, both Michael and Tyrone say they found the closure they were looking for, But there were moments still, our moments when the past resurfaces. Tom Guybison was released from prison in twenty fifteen, which was earlier than expected. Tom was originally given twelve and a half to twenty five years on the conspiracy and gun charges, but it turns out the judge in the case had used the sentencing guidelines given him too much time. Tom was later

I had to find out on the Internet looking for his name, and I did it on the humbug. I was just want I just punching his name and said, oh, he's released. I thought that they lit us down and that's why I guess in the sense I have some faith in the justice system, but don't let him out without letting us know.

There are other moments when memories of the trial re emerge. Tyrone told me about a trip he took to rural Pennsylvania with his then wife and how he felt really out of place, realizing that they were the only black couple around, and kind of having a moment of anxiety.

And then I said, no, stop, stop, stop, you're letting letting this world change you. That's not who you are. And if I go and give them to those fears, Thomas won, and you're not gonna win. I don't give you out. I don't know if you alive, I don't know what's going on with you, but I'm not gonna let you win. I'm sixty, so I try not to let anyone change me, because I think that's given anybody too much power.

So I don't want to change the person I am.

As he said this, Tyrone gestured at his brother Michael, at his niece Michelle.

So they'll tell you them. I'm just as silly as they come. I play around. I'm a hugger. I hugged them every time I see them, and what I say, Oh, I love y'all because that's what my mother. Well, I will say love you, God, bless you, and then we will leave.

That was like the thing that I remember y'all said, since you know, I don't go around pain, and she always say, make sure you say you know I love you.

Yeah, before you you know you leave. So we do it now.

Like I'll see my brother and I don't looking. I'm gonna hug my brother and tell me I love you man, because we're family.

Always make sure to say it. That was Dorothy Wood's wisdom. It's a sweet sentiment, but to me, it also speaks to the way that loss and grief stay with us, whispering in our ears. When I think back to the way that everything played out with the trial, there's something fundamentally unsatisfying.

Yeah.

Sure, we know that prosecutors bargain passes are given or strike deals, and in many ways the whole justice system is a series of compromises. Most defendants don't even go to trial, they just make please. And yet many of us, myself included, hold on to the perhaps naive hope of pure justice and clean endings, where the good guys win and righteousness prevails, and anything short of that leaves us

Oh, I think that it's about cover. It covered every pretty everything is about.

I want to say that I'm grateful that my grandma's praise was answered. I feel like that her praying put that conviction in the FBI agents to chase this cold case and drew Laman and you know is will help, you know, bring closure to this for her.

As Michelle sees it, her grandmother sent out a prayer and someone heard it, two guys actually Scott and Terry, and ultimately their investigation brought her peace. Michelle never met Scott or Terry, never talked to them, never even knew their names, and yet her take dovetails almost perfectly with theirs. The way they talked about being drawn in, almost mystically, as if summoned. I have to say, I'm not exactly sure it's the ending I had write. But then again,