An appellate court has thrown out the first-degree murder convictions of two men accused of fatally shooting a 15-year-old Anchorage girl a decade ago, saying they were improperly tried together.
The Alaska Court of Appeals released its decision Friday in the case of Lammar Burney, 39, and Jamal Townsend, 35. A jury jointly convicted Burney and Townsend seven years ago of consolidated first-degree and second-degree murder, as well as assault and weapons-misconduct charges, in the April 1, 2014 shooting of Precious Alex.
According to the Court of Appeals’ 49-page decision, Townsend had fought with Alex’s father over the quality of marijuana Townsend’s girlfriend recently purchased from him. On the morning of the shooting, Burney’s girlfriend, Karlie West, drove Burney and Townsend to Alex’s home on North Flower Street. Several shots were fired into Alex’s bedroom, killing her as she slept in her bed and striking another child in the foot.
The Anchorage Daily News reported that hundreds of people attended Alex’s funeral the following week. Speakers mourned Alex as a loyal and passionate teenager, with some urging the community to renounce violence.
Burney and Townsend each claimed that the other man had opened fire, amid changing accounts of the incident from West. She eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges, in exchange for her testimony at the murder trial.
When Burney and Townsend were convicted in October of 2017, the Anchorage district attorney’s office said Burney had gotten out of the vehicle after Townsend passed “what appears to be a solid object” to him in the back seat, then fired on the home.
According to Friday’s decision, Burney was later sentenced to 67 years in prison and Townsend was sentenced to 87 years.
Burney’s lawyer had asked that the men be tried separately, arguing that their defenses were “mutually exclusive” since each blamed the other for the shooting. The court denied that request, siding with the state’s argument that both men had either fired on the bedroom or aided in the shooting.
As attorneys for both defendants made their cases at trial, they repeatedly asked that their clients be tried separately. But the court denied their motions to do so, citing the need to hear the state’s evidence against both men.
Friday’s decision also cited a report of jury intimidation just after the verdict was read, when the foreman told a judge that a man he believed to be Townsend’s brother had earlier approached him outside the courtroom and “lifted up his waistband as though trying to show (him) a firearm.” The foreman later testified that he did not feel personally threatened, but did feel “intimidated.”
Both Burney and Townsend sought a new trial over the incident, describing it as jury intimidation and tampering as well as juror misconduct.
“Following a second evidentiary hearing, a different judge denied the defendants’ motion for a new trial, ruling that the encounter had been too ‘innocuous’ to be prejudicial,” the appellate judges said.
Burney and Townsend appealed, saying the trial court had erred both in not splitting their trials and in not granting a new trial over the juror-intimidation incident. On Friday, the appeals court agreed that the men should have been tried separately.
“However, we also conclude, based on the overwhelming strength of the State’s case for second-degree murder, that the error was prejudicial only as to the jury’s guilty verdict for first-degree murder rather than second-degree murder,” the judges said in the decision.
Friday’s ruling remands the case to a lower court for an evidentiary hearing, ordering a judge to “enter a new order on defendants’ motion for a new trial.” It also vacates their first-degree murder convictions, but defers to a lower court to either retry them or enter a judgment against them for second-degree murder.
One of the three appellate judges in Friday’s decision, Timothy Terrell, said in a partial dissent that he disagreed with vacating the first-degree murder convictions, saying the shots fired had targeted the victims’ bed.
