Sheryl Broadus believes she knows why an Allegheny County jury convicted her son of first-degree murder, and it's got nothing to do with the evidence.
As she sees it, Judge Donna Jo McDaniel was white. So were the 12 jurors. And they weren't about to believe a young black man like Cordell Broadus, 20, of Lincoln-Lemington, who claimed the victim tried to kill him first.
"Let's just say the judge was against him from the moment he walked in the courtroom. And the jury leaned the same way," she said.
She wasn't the only one wondering about the racial makeup of the jury during a homicide trial in May. So was the victim's father, Robert Houston, of East Liberty, a black man.
Houston's son, former Westinghouse football star Rob Dixon, was shot on June 25, 2001. He died of gunshot wounds to the chest and kidney. Dixon also was shot in the head and the upper thigh.
"I don't see none of his (Broadus') peers," Houston said, eyeing the jury box. "Here you've got people from the suburban — I don't know where they're from. I just find that kind of strange."
The lawyers weren't to blame.
Defense attorney Joseph Hudak and First Assistant District Attorney Edward Borkowski interviewed 47 randomly selected county residents during jury selection. Two were black. One had hearing problems; the other had a son recently murdered and didn't want to resurrect ugly memories. Both were excused with the consent of the attorneys.
In between interviews, Hudak repeatedly proclaimed that a juror's race doesn't matter.
He also struck off a tattooed man, explaining afterward, "He's a biker. Bikers hate blacks."
And a retired teacher, telling his client, "Look, he taught in Manchester. He'd hate you."
And another retiree raised in Wilkinsburg, who he said was "a Klansman." His client added, "I heard about Wilkinsburg in the '50s. White as a piece of paper on the sidewalk in the '50s."
The circumstances of the shooting were bound up in inner-city undertones.
Broadus, an admitted drug dealer, said he got the murder weapon from a drifter in exchange for a $20 rock of crack. Dixon had been busted before for smoking marijuana.
Witnesses said Broadus shot Dixon in cold blood. Broadus claimed he was showing the gun to Dixon, who then grabbed it and threatened him, sparking a life-or-death struggle. No one backed up Broadus' self-defense claim.
A key piece of evidence was a $200 bag of crack found lying on the victim's chest.
The prosecution told the jury it was a common thug's mark of disrespect and brought up "gangsta rap" lyrics about head wounds and closed-casket funerals to bolster the point. The defense said the crack belonged to the victim and that another man tried to steal it off Dixon's body, but Broadus stopped him.
In the end, the jury had to decide what happened on Rowan Avenue, Lincoln-Lemington, where their own presence would draw long stares.
Juror Ray Reaves, 62, an urban planning consultant from Squirrel Hill, said the racial dynamics were "strange," but the verdict was appropriate.
"We talked a little bit about if white middle-class people can judge what happened in a lower-income black neighborhood," Reaves said.
"But I don't think our values differed from the mothers or the fathers."
