Jurors' Quick Switch Clears Two In Heroin Case;
2 Convicted, Then Acquitted in a Drug Case
By Laura A. Kiernan, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 15, 1981 ; Page B1
A U.S. District Court jury last night acquitted two Maryland men of heroin possession and racketeering charges three hours after it had announced that it had convicted the men of the same charges. The jury resumed deliberations after the original announcement when the jury forewoman told the trial judge that she was confused about the jury's decision.
The forewoman, Jean Burnett, told a reporter later that she felt that the jurors, 10 women and two men who had sat through a five-week trial and deliberated for more than 11 hours before announcing their first decision, were tired and had decided on a guilty verdict because they were anxious to leave the courthouse.
When the defense began polling the jurors individually on what verdict had been reached, Burnett said, she made known her misgivings about it.
Burnett, 28, said she believed that her fellow jurors had not understood the defense lawyers' arguments that their clients had been entrapped by undercover federal narcotics agents who posed as Middle Eastern heroin connections. The jurors had seen videotaped government evidence of the two defendants trying to buy what the prosecution contended they believed was a half-kilo of heroin, which would have had a street value of more than $7 million.
When members returned to the jury room, Burnett said, "I made them the jurors believe they were entrapped, and they were."
Another juror, Robert Courtney, said of the jury's first decision in a conversation with a reporter:
"Everybody wanted to get back to their jobs and we rushed it."
In their second decision, the jurors acquitted the two defendants, Charles E. Greer, 36, of Palmer Park, and Thomas Flurry, 37, of Lanham, of all charges against them, including guilty verdicts from the first round of deliberations that would have carried a maximum 21-year prison term for Greer and 29 years for Flurry. Greer, Flurry and a third defendant, Larry Kenan, 35, of Southwest Washington, were acquitted by the jury both the first and second times of a charge that they conspired to possess and distribute heroin. There were no other charges against Kenan.
As the jurors left the courthouse last night, some of them kissed and embraced the defendants as their lawyers stood by. Asked how the jury had finally defined "entrapment," forewoman Burnett said, "It means the DEA U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't have the right to go to somebody . . . unless they knew the people were doing something wrong."
Burnett said that when the jurors went back to their deliberations, they went "step by step" through the defense, drew a chart, and then arrived at their decision that the defendants were not guilty.
As Greer left the courthouse, he told a reporter, "Well, I just proved that you can come back from the dead. They had buried me and now they woke me up."
The extraordinary reversal for the defense was abruptly tempered last night when Judge Joyce Hens Green, who presided at the trial, told defense lawyer Kenneth Michael Robinson immediately after the verdict to report back to court on Oct. 23 to show cause why he should not be held in criminal contempt in connection with some of his conduct during the trial.
Robinson, who was Greer's lawyer, said he had defended his client with what he thought was "curbed zeal . . . in a very hard case" and was confident that the trial transcript and witnesses' testimony would show that "I was at no time disrespectful or contemptuous."
The case against the three men was the first major drug conspiracy case in which the U.S. attorney's office here approved a so-called "sting" operation in which undercover agents posed as drug dealers, gave out a small sample of 95 percent heroin, and then later set up a sale of a half-kilo of "heroin," which in fact was a worthless chemical compound that responds like heroin to simple purity tests.
Lawyers for the three men had several times raised the question of entrapment as part of their defense, contending that their clients originally thought they were making deals for precious gems but were then induced into getting into the heroin distribution business. By the time the government secretly videotaped two of the men in the hotel room, the lawyers argued, the government had persuaded their clients to become drug dealers.
The prosecution's case began last January when one of two Pakistanis held at the D.C. Jail in connection with a separate $28 million international heroin smuggling scheme told federal investigators that Kenan had provided a telephone number for a contact about a possible narcotics deal. Investigators then began the undercover operation.
Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.
