As he continued, Judge Stephens periodically glanced directly at Jason, making sure the now-convicted defendant knew he was the intended audience.
The judge suggested if Michelle had called the police on November 2, 2006, and reported her husband had beaten her, and the police had found her “with missing teeth, a broken nose, and black eyes, no one that this couple knew, including their closest friends, would have been surprised. They would not, in my opinion, have been a bit surprised. So why would anyone be surprised when Michelle Young was found beaten to death?” he asked rhetorically. “The pattern is the same. The case is similar to every other case of domestic violence that has been played out in this courtroom in years’ past.”
Michelle “wasn’t just murdered,” Judge Stephens lamented. “She suffered a beating the likes of which we seldom see. This woman was punished. The assailant struck her over thirty times with a weapon of some sort and she was undoubtedly unconscious after the second or third blow.”
He said, “Overcome by anger and rage,” Jason “continued to beat her until he was exhausted. Only then did he stop beating her, because he didn’t have the strength to strike her any more.”
Even then, the judge continued, disgust and derision now dominating his tone, “he had the energy to strip her of her engagement and wedding rings, perhaps because in his mind she was unworthy to wear them.” He noted how Jason had also violently stripped his former fiancée of her engagement ring “when she had challenged him or somehow proven herself unworthy” to wear it.
Wake County’s senior-most judge expressed his opinion Jason had significant mental health and anger-management issues, “and significant issues involving women.” Not only did he have the motive and opportunity to commit this crime, he continued, “the circumstances of the crime scene point directly to him. I have no quarrel with this jury verdict.”
His soliloquy complete, Judge Stephens asked Collins if his client wished to address the court before being sentenced. The Public Defender responded Jason didn’t wish to do so.
“Very well,” the judge replied. “Jason Young, stand please.” In full compliance, Jason, Collins, and Klinkosum rose from their seats.
Judge Stephens then announced the only sentence permitted under the law: “The jury, having returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree of Michelle Young, as by law required, it is the judgment of the court that the defendant be sentenced to life imprisonment in the North Carolina Department of Corrections without the benefit of parole. Jason Young, you’re in the custody of the Sheriff to begin serving that sentence.”
With that pronouncement, the freedom Jason had enjoyed for more than seven months came to a sudden—and permanent—end. Two uniformed Sheriff’s deputies whisked him away through a side door. This time, there would be no last hug for his mom. Not even a wave goodbye. The next time Pat Young would get to see her son, there would be a thick glass window separating them.
• • • • •
Interviewed outside the courthouse, Cummings told reporters Linda and Meredith had “been seeking justice for Michelle for almost six years. And now they feel like they have that. They feel like the jury has spoken the truth, and they are relieved.” It had been “a long, hard path for the family of Michelle Young,” Holt chimed in. “What sometimes gets lost in the coverage is that this is a real life that was lost.”
Sheriff Donnie Harrison, reflecting on the hard work of his officers, added, “I wouldn’t be able to tell you how many hours we spent on this case.” Noting the absence of any “smoking gun,” he expressed pride his office had “brought some closure to this family.” He reminded reporters, “It was a brutal killing.”
Tracey Raksnis, a 31-year-old healthcare worker who had relocated to Wake County from Delaware the year after the murder, served ably as the jury’s foreperson. In an interview the day after the verdict, she provided a glimpse inside the jury room. “Going into the weekend,” she said, “we were at seven guilty and five undecided.” She hadn’t yet made up her own mind.
The guilty verdict, she said, boiled down to a few key facts: “The lack of the shirt, the lack of the shoes, the fact that he didn’t talk. This is a man who is on trial for his life, and didn’t even say, ‘I am not guilty.’”
Also critical to the jury’s decision was the fact Cassidy had been cleaned up, the foreperson explained. “I don’t see anyone else doing that. If this was random, if this was just a robbery, I don’t think you pay that kind of attention.”
Raksnis noted she had slept easy “knowing that I made the right decision.”
24
Appeal
Less than five seconds after Judge Stephens sentenced Jason to life in prison, Bryan Collins—still on his feet—announced his client would appeal the jury’s verdict.
In response to that oral notice of appeal, the judge appointed the North Carolina Appellate Defender’s office to serve as Jason’s appellate counsel. Soon, lawyers from that office began poring over more than 8,500 pages of trial transcripts, in search of an issue that would compel the Court of Appeals to overturn their new client’s guilty verdict. It didn’t take them long to find one.
In their view, Jason had been deprived of a fair trial because the criminal jury had been informed Judge Stephens had also been involved in the civil, wrongful death case against Jason, had reviewed the evidence, and had declared that he was Michelle’s killer.
His appellate lawyers had never heard of a judge in a criminal case permitting a civil judgment of any kind—let alone one that had been pronounced by the criminal trial judge himself—to be admitted against a criminal defendant. Surely, they believed, there were precedents in court cases that prohibited civil judgments from being used in this manner.
Not only did they quickly find court cases along those very lines, those cases led them directly to the Holy Grail they were confident would set Jason free—or at least grant him a new trial. Buried deep within the tens of thousands of laws comprising the North Carolina General Statutes, Jason’s new lawyers found a single sentence that read like music to their legal ears.
Section 1-149 of the General Statutes—which in one iteration or another had been on the books since 1868—stated, quite simply: No pleading can be used in a criminal prosecution against a party as proof of a fact admitted or alleged in it.
But that is exactly what Judge Stephens had permitted the prosecutors to do, they believed, when Clerk of Court Lorrin Freeman recited chapter and verse from the wrongful death complaint and the default judgment he had entered. And, once again, when the child custody complaint referring to that judgment was admitted into evidence during Mike Schilawski’s testimony.
In their 52-page brief to the Court of Appeals, Jason’s appellate lawyers made the violation of section 1-149 the centerpiece of his appeal.
• • • • •
On December 12, 2013, just three city blocks from where the second jury had convicted Jason of first-degree murder, a packed courtroom anxiously awaited yet another battle in Jason’s case—this time at the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
Linda and Meredith Fisher sat together with Jack Michaels, the lawyer who five years earlier had filed the wrongful death case that would be the featured topic of the oral argument that day. Pat Young sat on the opposite side of the gallery, surrounded by friends.
Howard Cummings and Becky Holt were in the front row, seated directly behind lawyers from the North Carolina Attorney General’s office who would be arguing for the State.
Conspicuously absent from the day’s proceedings was Jason Young himself—by then better known as Prisoner 1309245. He was hundreds of miles away at the Alexander Correctional Institution in the North Carolina mountains—his new home.
As the Clerk gaveled the courtroom to order, the three judges assigned to the case made their entrance and assumed their seats. Judge Donna Stroud—the most senior of the three—called the case of State v. Jason Lynn Young on for argument.
Assi
stant Appellate Defender Barbara Blackman—Jason’s new lawyer—walked up to the lectern dividing the two counsel tables and prepared to deliver her argument. The rules provided her all of thirty minutes to make her points and answer whatever questions the judges might pose.
Blackman began by quoting from Becky Holt’s closing argument, which Holt herself had begun, “This case is solved. Jason Young brutally murdered Michelle Young in the early morning hours of November the 3rd, 2006, in the bedroom they shared at 5108 Birchleaf Drive.” Blackman told the judges that those words “should sound familiar to you, because it’s the language that appears in the wrongful death and child custody complaints.”
“When the State’s circumstantial case only got it a hung jury favoring acquittal,” she argued, “the State turned to this inadmissible evidence in its attempt to gain a conviction. And if this type of evidence is admitted—for what will apparently be the first time in the country in a homicide prosecution—I think that it’s simply going to open the door to the pursuit of civil litigation before indictment in order to manufacture evidence for use at an eventual criminal trial.”
Before Blackman could get another word out, Judge Robert N. Hunter, Jr. interrupted, asking why no objection had been lodged based specifically on section 1-149. She agreed a more specific objection should have been made and lamented Jason’s trial counsel had failed to conduct the necessary research to become aware of the statute’s existence. But no specific objection was required, she argued, because Judge Stephens needed to comply with section 1-149’s statutory “mandate” irrespective of whether an objection had been made.
The prejudice to Jason resulting from the admission of evidence related to the wrongful death case, Blackman argued, was easy to see, noting that in the first trial—when no such evidence was admitted—the jury voted 8-4 in favor of acquittal. But when that evidence was presented in the second trial, the jury reached a unanimous guilty verdict. “So I think we can say with confidence,” she argued, “that this evidence did have a probable impact on the jury.”
Jason’s new lawyer contended it was “fundamentally unfair for the jury to be advised” a judgment had been entered declaring her client to be the killer and that his failure to answer the wrongful death complaint constituted an admission he was, in fact, the killer.
Assistant Attorney General Dan O’Brien made the primary argument for the State. Jason’s lawyers were “simply wrong,” he argued, in their position that section 1-149 “bars civil matters from being used in criminal cases. That’s just not so.” The statute, he told the judges, merely prevents prosecutors from using evidence of civil proceedings to tell the jury, “‘See … this has already been adjudicated.’ That’s what’s improper.”
Judge Chris Dillon pressed O’Brien to explain why the State sought to have the wrongful death case brought to the jury’s attention if it wasn’t to suggest the defendant’s guilt. O’Brien replied, in view of everything Jason had on the line when he failed to answer the wrongful death complaint—more than $4 million in life insurance proceeds and custody of Cassidy—his decision to remain silent, and not respond with the same information he shared with the first jury, helped establish his testimony had been fabricated.
Judge Hunter seemed perplexed by that response, asking why Jason’s default “is of interest, or relevance, to a criminal jury trying to make a determination of who killed Mrs. Young? I mean, so what if he allows a default judgment to go in. How does that fact, one way or the other, have any impact on whether he killed his wife?” Pressing the Assistant Attorney General further, he asked, “Isn’t the purpose of it for the State to say that he has admitted liability in the civil case and that he is guilty in the criminal case?”
“Absolutely not,” O’Brien responded. “The State never admitted it for that purpose and never argued that.” Rather, he contended, Jason had given this “simple explanation” during his testimony in the first trial related to his stay at the Hampton Inn. “If that was all he had to say, if that was his explanation for why he was really somewhere else, he would have said that when $4.2 million and custody of his child was on the line. And so it discredits his statement.”
Judging by his bewildered expression, however, Judge Hunter didn’t seem impressed by that explanation.
In less than an hour, the entire argument was over. Interviewed outside the courthouse, Cummings didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned about what he had just observed—or the likely outcome.
“I believe that the case against Jason Young was tried free from error,” he told reporters, “and our office and the Attorney General’s Office is confident that the Court of Appeals will affirm his conviction.”
As it turned out, however, that confidence was misplaced.
• • • • •
On April 1, 2014, the Court of Appeals issued a unanimous, 58-page opinion. To Linda and Meredith Fisher, it read like a bad April Fool’s joke—only it was no joke. The headline on the WRAL News website succinctly captured its significance: NC
Appeals Court Orders Third Murder Trial for Jason Young. It was as devastating to Linda and Meredith—and the prosecution team—as the hung jury had been three years before. Yet another startling turn of events. Not surprisingly, the opinion was authored by Judge Hunter, whose skepticism of the State’s position had permeated the oral argument. That same skepticism was on full display in the opinion, which noted the State “did not offer an explicit purpose for offering evidence of the default judgment nor did the State offer a purpose for admitting the child custody complaint.”
The opinion rejected the State’s contention this evidence had been offered to impeach Jason’s testimony by showing Jason’s “silence in not responding to the lawsuits cast doubt on his subsequent testimony at his first trial.”
The State’s position seemed to be, Judge Hunter wrote, Jason had “great incentives to answer the civil matters and explain the evidence.” But that purpose, he reasoned, revealed the State’s true intention of introducing evidence of the civil matters—“to show proof of Defendant’s guilt, in violation of N.C. Gen. Stat. § 1-149.”
It also wasn’t permissible for the State to impeach Jason’s testimony, the opinion continued, because it was the State—not Jason—who introduced that testimony at the second trial. Because Jason hadn’t testified at the retrial, there was nothing to impeach. It was also noteworthy, Judge Hunter wrote, that the State was unable to point to a single precedent “where a trial court has attempted to gain admission of a default judgment and a slayer determination in a homicide prosecution.”
The three judges unanimously concluded Judge Stephens had improperly disregarded section 1-149 and abused his discretion in admitting evidence of the civil proceedings, resulting in Jason’s presumption of innocence being “irreparably diminished.” Admission of this evidence, the court held, “severely impacted” Jason’s “ability to receive a fair trial.”
The three-judge panel therefore ordered that Jason receive a third trial.
The ink on the opinion was barely dry when the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office announced—the very next day—it would seek review by the North Carolina Supreme Court. Which would mean another round of briefing and yet another oral argument—before the entire, seven-member Supreme Court—a process that would likely last another year.
Justice for Linda and Meredith—having already been delayed for over seven years—would have to wait that much longer. Their only saving grace was that, this time, Jason would spend that entire time in prison.
• • • • •
On May 19, 2015, Jason’s case came on for argument before the North Carolina Supreme Court. Once again, the Fishers and Pat Young sat on opposite sides of the gallery, each with very different hopes and expectations. Linda and Meredith, for their part, were hopeful the Supreme Court would undo the Court of Appeals’ decision and finally put an end to their long, arduous quest for justice.
Pat, on the other hand, was equally hope
ful the decision would be affirmed, and her son would have the opportunity to convince a third jury that the State—relying only on proper evidence—couldn’t prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The seven justices sat in rapt attention as Dan O’Brien—representing the State, now as the appellant—delivered his argument. He began by suggesting the Court of Appeals had failed to appreciate it was Jason’s counsel who interjected the civil pleadings into the second trial, specifically, during Bryan Collins’ cross-examination of Meredith.
During that cross-examination, the Assistant AG told the justices, Meredith was asked directly about the custody complaint’s allegation that Jason had brutally murdered Michelle. Thereafter, O’Brien pointed out, the defense team never objected to any evidence regarding the custody case. Any appellate review of the introduction of the custody case, he asserted, was therefore waived.
He then focused on the wrongful death complaint and judgment, reminding the court that Jason had testified he gave up custody of Cassidy because he had no money left to fight the custody case. That is the very reason why, O’Brien contended, his failure to respond to the wrongful death complaint was so significant: after all, by failing to respond to that complaint, he gave up the right to claim more than $4 million in life insurance proceeds “and let his assets be seized without even an answer.”
O’Brien argued section 1-149 was merely a “common-sense principle” that proof of a fact in civil court is not proof of that same fact by the “beyond a reasonable doubt standard” required in criminal court.
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 33