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Who's bad, who's good in topsy-turvy vigilante case?

By SUE CARLTON
Published October 10, 2005

In a perfect TV version of a court case, the victim of the crime would be a sympathetic, hardworking soul, unwitting prey for an obvious bad guy. The bad guy would be a menacing sort with a record as long as your arm.

In the real-life manslaughter case against Lawrence Storer, the roles might seem like they've been flipped.

Awaiting his trial, Storer runs a busy Thai restaurant in downtown Tampa. He's a self-made owner of a small business. He has no criminal record. He is accused of getting into his Ford Explorer and running down and killing 24-year-old Shantavious Wilson two years ago.

Wilson was a felon who had just robbed Storer at his restaurant, pointing a gun at his head before running off with the money.

If this case wasn't already provocative enough, with its themes of vigilante justice and a-man-who-refused-to-take-it, here's a twist: The jury may hear testimony about how bad a guy the victim was. It wasn't the first time Wilson robbed a person of Asian ancestry working alone at night at a small business.

Usually when lawyers tangle over what's called "similar fact" evidence, they're talking about the accused. And usually it's prosecutors who would love to be able to tell a jury that the defendant on trial had committed the same kind of crime before. For obvious reasons, it can be dangerous to give jurors evidence that could make them think, Hey, this guy did this sort of thing before, he probably did it again.

Under what's called the Williams Rule, judges sometimes allow that kind of evidence if the previous case is very similar. Say a guy on trial for bank robbery has three previous convictions for the same thing. Each time he arrived in a taxi, wore a Denver Broncos T-shirt and misspelled the word "twenties" on the note. Under the Williams Rule, a judge might allow testimony about those past cases.

But in the Storer case, we're talking about the victim's record. Some longtime lawyers told me they have never heard of the Williams Rule used when it came to a victim.

In 1997, Wilson was charged with sexual battery on a child and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. He had convictions for carrying a concealed firearm and being a felon in possession of a firearm. None of that is relevant here, and Circuit Judge Rex Barbas rightly denied defense attorney John Fitzgibbons' motion on this. (The jury also won't hear that Wilson had a woman's missing debit card the night he died.)

But Wilson's record also includes a no contest plea in the 1998 robbery of a Tampa laundry. It was a small business, the victim was Asian, and she was working alone at night, like Storer. The judge ruled that the jury could hear about that case. Prosecutors have appealed, and the appeals court is scheduled to hear argument later this month. Until the court rules, Storer's trial is on hold.

Getting a jury thinking about the worth of a victim seems to me to be a risky business. Would a murderer be less guilty if his victim was a homeless man, or somebody who was just generally a jerk? Would he be more guilty if he killed, say, a man who spent his life volunteering for Habitat for Humanity? In allowing testimony about prior crimes, you risk a jury seeing the victim as a life worth less consideration.

But here's a point for the defense in the Storer case. The only living witness to what happened between the two men at the restaurant that night before Wilson fled is Storer. If Storer doesn't testify, as is his right, or the jury doesn't believe his version of the robbery, the defense makes a pretty good argument that the jury should be allowed to hear about a similar robbery committed by Wilson.

Regardless of what the appeals court decides, the jury that ultimately hears the manslaughter case against Storer will have much bigger issues to grapple with. They'll have to figure out how to make sense of street justice, and the good guy who became the bad guy, and the bad guy who became the victim.

--Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 10, 2005, 01:18:12]