One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer

by M. William Phelps

  “Have you also had sufficient time to discuss with your lawyer any request for lesser included offenses?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The judge asked Jennifer to sit down. She then had a lengthy discussion with the lawyers about the charges and how she was going to explain the varying degrees of murder to the jury before sending them off to deliberate: fifteen years for manslaughter was a sentence the judge mentioned as a possibility; thirty years for accessory after the fact; life in prison, of course, for first-degree murder.

  The jury had options on the table. They could effectively cut Jennifer Mee a break if they saw fit.

  When they were finished discussing the jury’s options, the judge asked Jennifer to stand again.

  “So as it is, if you were found guilty of first-degree murder, I’d have to give you life in prison. If you were found guilty of accessory after the fact, I could give you up to thirty years. If you were found guilty of manslaughter, I could give you up to fifteen years. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you in agreement with your lawyers about the lesser included offenses?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  After the judge asked a few more questions and received “yes, ma’am” answers from Jennifer, the judge told her, “You may be seated.”

  CHAPTER 93

  A MURDER TRIAL is a lot like a play: the judge is the director, and the sidebars and proffers are the discussions with the crew backstage. There’s drama, laughter, tears. There’s even joy, as well as anger. In the end, it’s a sad affair no matter what, because, within all of that production, the most important reason why they are there to begin with gets lost: the victim. Where was Shannon’s voice? Where was that “closure” families seek, but can never find? Here was a young man with an entire life ahead of him whose existence had been snuffed out.

  Whether Shannon was going downtown to meet a girl or to buy a bag of weed, it did not matter. The only significant factor in it was that he should be alive today. And jurors, as they sat and listened, looking over at Jennifer Mee every so often, trying to gauge her gaze and figure out where she was coming from, were going to have the opportunity to honor Shannon Griffin by holding one of his killers responsible—that is, if they believed the evidence supported the claim made by the state that Jennifer Mee played a part in Shannon’s murder.

  When it came time for the jury to hear closing statements, a trial that had lasted all of three days felt as though it had gone on forever. Why? Nobody could later figure out. It was just one of those odd things that arises out of the dust of a murder trial.

  * * *

  As the state’s closing got under way, one phrase would define the purported future of Jennifer Mee. Christopher LaBruzzo felt he and ASA Hunter-Olney had presented a solid case for guilt. The foundation for that was a tape-recorded conversation, or State’s Exhibit 50, of Jennifer calling Rachel from jail on the day she was arrested for murder.

  LaBruzzo played that tape for jurors before he began. And it was here, where that phrase would ring throughout the courtroom one more time, and, in the state’s view, place the onus of masterminding this crime on one person, in her words.

  “. . . I set everything up. . . .”

  That was the key “admission” from the telephone call—that one line, according to the state, was all each juror needed to hear to convict.

  Putting it into perspective, after the tape played, LaBruzzo addressed jurors, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today . . . because Jennifer Mee set everything up. More correctly, she set up Shannon Griffin for a robbery. A robbery which, and as you know in this case, he ultimately was shot four times in the chest in a dark alleyway.”

  LaBruzzo asked jurors to focus on the two questions the judge had explained and which they must answer: Was there a crime committed? And did Jennifer Mee commit that crime?

  The verdict could be distilled down to those two factors.

  The most damaging statement LaBruzzo could have made during his entire closing wasn’t a point-the-finger moment, accusing Jennifer of being an evil, dark, and twisted sociopath that set out to murder a young man. (She was not that person, and LaBruzzo was smart enough to see it.) It wasn’t an accusation by the ASA that Jennifer sat down and constructed this robbery and murder days or weeks in advance. (She certainly had not.) The most powerful statement the ASA made as he spoke loud and clear within the first few minutes of his opening turned out to be how “the court is going to tell you that under Florida’s felony murder law, that if you engage in certain crimes, in this case a robbery, and during the commission of that crime, a person is murdered, then you can be guilty of murder in the first degree under a felony murder theory.... Certain crimes, like robbery, are dangerous enough and have been enumerated by the legislature to include that if you commit a murder in the course of it, you are now guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Jurors were bound by the law. This was regardless of what they felt or thought about Jennifer Mee, her life, and how much she might have participated in the crime.

  From that crucial point, LaBruzzo pivoted every other factor of his closing. He explained the instructions the jury received. He implored jurors to understand that Jennifer “helped” other people commit first-degree murder. He said the state proved this during the trial far beyond any reasonable doubt.

  He then answered the question of whether the murder could have been the result of a sexual rendezvous turned deadly—the “Jenni Charron hooking up with Shannon Griffin” theory Trevena had trumpeted throughout the trial.

  “There’s been some suggestion to you that by the fact that his pants were down that that could, in some way . . . speculate that there may have been some sexual crime going on back there.... One, we know that his pockets were emptied. So you have to assume he had something in his pockets that they wanted. People carry their wallet, their keys, in their pocket, and we know that that was taken from him.”

  Trevena had given it the old college try, but as LaBruzzo summed up the sexual encounter possibility, it felt like a lifeless and weak argument totally devoid of any momentum that it might have gathered heading toward the closings.

  “And then there’s this condom,” LaBruzzo said, continuing to try and answer Trevena’s second theory. “And I guess that’s the link that there may be a sexual crime occurring back in this area.” He then cleared up any misinformation jurors might have had about this evidence, adding, “It’s a condom wrapper. . . . And we know it has Mr. Laron Raiford’s DNA on it. So, what does that tell you? . . . One thing it can’t tell you is when it was put there. It never can and never will. So at some point in time, either that night or at some point previous to that, Mr. Raiford had been in that dark alleyway. Look, it’s right around the corner from his house. . . .”

  LaBruzzo then furthered his point by stating how Jenni had admitted that Laron was unfaithful—and where would a better place be, LaBruzzo suggested, to cheat on your girlfriend than in the alleyway behind your apartment.

  The ASA did not spend much time on this because, in the end, jurors believed one side or the other. There was no gray area there within the Jenni/Shannon sex crime idea.

  LaBruzzo hit on the scooter, the phone records, the testimony the state had presented, Jennifer’s statements to the police and, finally, the recording. It was all there in that phone call between a mother and her child.

  When all was said and done, LaBruzzo explained, the case against Jennifer Mee boiled down to one “principal [main] theory.” And that was to “follow the law” as citizens of the community doing your duty as jurors. If jurors simply did that, LaBruzzo was certain, they’d have to come back with a first-degree murder verdict.

  He reminded the jury of a very important point that had somehow been overlooked throughout the trial: “It takes her to make this happen.... She tells you she brought him there.”

  Was it that simple?

  After perhaps carrying on too long,
by going through jury instructions more in depth than what was needed, LaBruzzo concluded by saying how Jennifer “benefited from the robbery. She was able to evade detection, at least temporarily, and she’s guilty of murder in the first degree. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 94

  JOHN TREVENA WAS feeling rather ambivalent as he stood to give his closing statement. It had been an uphill battle all the way. Wrapping the case up with a bow was not going to be any easier. Jennifer Mee, Trevena knew, faced a mountain of incriminating evidence if one was to take into account the law and how it pertained to her case. Trevena’s hope, of course, was for the jury to see his point that the possibility of Jenni Charron and Shannon Griffin meeting to have sex, and Laron Raiford catching them, was enough to cause reasonable doubt. He felt good about that portion of the case. Jurors had to consider that it could have happened that way.

  At least . . . he hoped so.

  Trevena began by explaining that the deliberation process had rules that needed to be followed very carefully. There was a burden of proof to consider: reasonable doubt and actual evidence of the crimes being committed by the defendant. Was all of that present in this case? Trevena seemed to ask.

  “Miss Mee is not charged with robbery. However, to be guilty of felony murder in Florida, you must find that she is guilty of robbery in order to reach a guilty verdict of felony murder. So if you find there is no robbery, there can be no first-degree murder.”

  Trevena then broke into a long explanation of reasonable doubt and how it was not just something heard on TV programs. There should be zero reasonable doubt in each juror’s mind if the jury reached a verdict of guilty.

  He then described the first few witnesses and how their testimony did not do much in making Jennifer Mee guilty of first-degree murder. When he got to Doug Bolden, Trevena elegantly used part of his testimony to point out an inconsistency with the state’s charges and the case prosecutors had presented.

  “What Mr. Bolden said that was of great importance is that this was his cousin’s first vacation, because he had his one-year anniversary at Walmart, who is a drug-free employer—another corroborating factor to his drug-free lifestyle. He had been given the week off and he was going to meet a girl.... He had dressed up, was excited, was wearing a lot of cologne. He had said . . . he’s going out to see a girl. Nothing about he’s going to purchase marijuana—that theory by the state fails. . . .”

  Continuing, Trevena mentioned all the witnessed and talked a bit about their testimony and how it reflected on Jennifer Mee’s innocence. It was rather tedious, but it was something Trevena felt he had to do in order to build upon his points of reasonable doubt and the testimony failing to establish a first-degree murder charge.

  Then it was on to the phone call between Jennifer and Rachel—perhaps Trevena’s biggest stumbling block.

  “The state relies solely on the last statement (that prison call). And, unfortunately,” Trevena explained passionately, making a solid argument, “she is being pulled away by some jail employee.” He said you could hear what was going on in the background, quoting what had been said as “‘You need to put the phone down. Come with me.’” Trevena then explained how Jennifer’s phone time was up. He argued that had she been able to talk “a little bit longer, we may have had more answers and more explanation as her mother continued to question about what was going on.” But she had been “cut off exactly at the point that she said, ‘Well, I set everything up.’” He asked jurors to ask themselves what that actually meant. It was out of context, Trevena suggested. One line taken entirely out of a call’s framework cannot be enough to convict a young woman of first-degree murder.

  Or could it?

  “That statement standing alone is hardly evidence of murder,” Trevena continued. He said that nobody in the courtroom, including the state, was “suggesting that Miss Mee was trying to have . . . this gentleman murdered.” He added how it was never part of any “plan or intent” to see that Shannon Griffin wound up dead.

  The interviews with police were next. This was where Trevena saw an opportunity to bring in all sorts of reasonable doubt.

  “What was jaw-dropping about that was Detective Wawrzynski, according to him, was completely unaware that Detective Gibson had conducted a taped interview of Jennifer Mee just minutes before [he had], and admitted [that] he didn’t find out until I confronted him in his deposition almost a year later. He’s the lead detective. The. Lead. Detective.”

  Jenni Charron was next.

  “But, interestingly, Jennifer Charron, when she took the stand, she seemed really street-smart. She had an answer for almost everything.” Trevena talked about how “freely” Jenni “admitted . . . that she engaged in acts to try to cover up what the boys had done.” He listed several of the laws she had broken. Then he pointed out, “She invoked her right to a lawyer.” He said Jenni “stonewalled” the police. “When you juxtapose the two of them, you have Jennifer Charron—and they are both named Jennifer, oddly enough—and Jennifer Mee. And you have this . . . sex worker, makes good money living her life” and “you have Jennifer Mee, nineteen years old, ninth-grade education, kind of an introvert. . . .”

  The implication was that Jennifer Mee was the perfect scapegoat—the ideal stooge to take Jenni’s place (and blame) in the crime.

  “And then the one (Jenni Charron) that freely admits felonious conduct gets a complete free pass and walks out police station doors!” Trevena explained how he thought it was “remarkable.” He said the “whole idea” that the crime was a “setup for a drug deal for marijuana” turned out to be “completely inconsistent with the facts.... The victim did not use drugs.”

  Still, Trevena had one question to answer: What was Jennifer referring to in her phone call regarding “Because I set everything up”?

  He needed to explain that.

  “So, what was it that could have been ‘set up’ by Jennifer Mee when she says, ‘I set it up’?” Trevena said, and then paused briefly before answering his own question: “‘I set up a meeting with Jennifer Charron’? Miss Charron, attractive young lady, she admitted to you, she’s a sex worker, a prostitute.”

  “I object,” LaBruzzo said as Trevena stopped. “This is not facts in evidence.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said with a cautionary glance toward Trevena. “Move on. . . .”

  From there, John Trevena took a chance, saying, “To this day, how can you go back and render a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree? And the lessers that were included, none of those apply—because, again, you have to have a robbery to get to the felony murder. This isn’t a manslaughter case. And the only evidence of an accessory after the fact was a complete confession by Jennifer Charron as to all of that.”

  It was a bold move, essentially telling jurors not to find Jennifer Mee guilty of manslaughter or accessory after the fact—charges that they could have explored and considered here.

  Was Trevena saying all or nothing?

  He never indicated—because he was finished.

  The state had ASA Hunter-Olney rebut Trevena’s closing, but it was more of the same “you should believe us, not him” rhetoric that can get rather desperate-sounding during closings, carrying on far too long.

  The judge had her deputy bailiff hand out jury instructions as she read through them. By the time she had finished, it was well after six o’clock at night. The jury needed to eat dinner, the judge explained, as the court considered when the start of official deliberations would begin.

  CHAPTER 95

  AS THE JURY began deliberating that same night, Rachel Robidoux retired to her hotel room about a mile away from the courthouse to lie down and catch her breath. At any moment, the jury could come back with a decision on her daughter’s fate. It was altogether ner ve-wracking and disconcerting for Rachel to think about. She had sat in the courtroom for every moment of the trial, unable to help her child. Now all she could do was pace, chain-smoke cigarettes, and think long and hard about all
the what-ifs.

  Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, after an hour or so behind closed doors, the jury had a few questions. It seemed they were taking the matter of jury duty quite seriously, as they should.

  “Please clarify the phrase ‘abiding conviction of guilt,’” the foreman, on behalf of the whole jury, requested of the court.

  The judge asked John Trevena if he had any suggestions.

  “Pull Webster’s? Google it?”

  In the end, the court decided to answer the question by stating that the jury had “all the law they are going to have” within the instructions the court had read through and handed out before deliberations started. If they had questions pertaining to the law, they needed to refer to those instructions.

  A second, more technical question came up next. It was in reference to determining if Jennifer Mee was a “principal” in the robbery, and, if so, would that apply?

  Trevena thought he had explained this in his closing. You cannot have one without the other. If Jennifer was not part of the robbery, well, how in the heck could she be part of the murder?

  And once again, the court told the jury to refer to the instructions.

  Jurors went back to work.

  CHAPTER 96

  RACHEL ROBIDOUX HEARD her phone ringing.

  “Yes?” she said eagerly.

  “Come back to court,” the voice said. It was one of Trevena’s colleagues. Word was the jury was apparently ready to announce its verdict. “They could come back [at] any time now.”

  Rachel was still inside her hotel room. She gathered her things quickly and left.

  The jury had spent about four hours deliberating.

  Shannon Griffin’s mother, Shanna, sat front and center as the courtroom assembled to hear the jury’s verdict.

  Just before that, John Trevena had stood and announced that he wanted to “move for a mistrial based upon the court’s instructions to the jury over” an objection Trevena had raised earlier.