Juror Changes Mind but Her Crusade to Reverse Man’s Robbery Conviction Fails

Soon after she and other jurors found Napoleon Winchell Cotton guilty of a $75,000 robbery at the Long Beach Naval Station, Winnie Jackson began feeling guilty herself.

Jackson decided she’d made a mistake, that Cotton was not the man who committed the stickup inside a federal credit union office at the station. And she decided to try to reverse the conviction that she and 11 other jurors had voted in Long Beach Superior Court.

“I’m the victim in this,” she declared.

It is not unusual for jurors to have second thoughts after ruling on a hard-fought criminal case. But prosecution and defense attorneys agree that Jackson’s actions were extraordinary: She called FBI agents and private investigators who had looked into the case. She copied police reports that had never gotten to the jury. She met with Cotton in jail.

Finally, she filed a declaration renouncing her vote of guilty and asked Superior Court Judge Eugene J. Long to order a new trial. At her instigation, the jury foreman filed a similar declaration.

On Wednesday, when Long brushed aside Jackson’s change of heart and sentenced Cotton to six years in prison, one of the most disappointed people in court was the former juror who had made his case her personal crusade.

For Jackson, a 45-year-old community affairs officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services, the crusade began moments after the jury ended six days of deliberations April 10. The panel found Cotton guilty of one count of robbery but failed to reach a verdict on a charge that he took $38,835 from a courier at the Queen Mary/Spruce Goose attractions in Long Beach; the vote was 11 to 1, with Jackson holding out.

She was walking from the jurors’ box when she saw Cotton’s mother in the courtroom and decided to explain to the woman why she had voted to convict him of the credit union robbery: Eyewitnesses had easily pointed Cotton out in court, after all, and testimony painted an unappealing portrait of him as someone who at one time kept ledgers for a drug dealer.

Cotton’s mother, Earnest Cotton, responded by saying, “I want to show you some reports,” Jackson recalled.

They were investigative notes and crime reports, including speculation by an FBI agent who interviewed Cotton that he was not the likely robber because he did not seem “bright enough to pull off the heists and his life style wasn’t commensurate with someone who had come into some big cash.”

Descriptions Conflict

The reports also included witness descriptions of the robber as a man of medium height and build. Cotton is a 6-foot, 210-pound former boxer “who looks a lot like Mike Tyson,” she said.

“They didn’t show us any of that. That’s evidence. That’s hard evidence,” Jackson exclaimed while studying over the documents spread across the dining room table of her Signal Hill condominium.

Jackson said she never would have voted to convict if she had seen such material.

“I started getting mad as I read them. If I’m going to make a decision, I think you would give me everything to . . . make a decision with,” she said.

To Deputy Dist. Atty. Kirk Newkirk, who prosecuted the case, Jackson is an example of a naive juror who does not understand court procedure. In almost all cases, certain material is kept from the jury because of rules of evidence or trial strategy.

“The only miscarriage of justice was that she hung on Count 1,” Newkirk said, referring to the Queen Mary holdup. If other jurors made a habit of asking the court to reverse verdicts, he noted, “the system would achieve meltdown.”

Police speculated that the same person committed the two Long Beach holdups, occurring in January and February of 1988. Cotton became a suspect because he had worked for an armored car company that served the credit union and quit shortly before the robberies, failing even to pick up his last paycheck.

Cotton said he was in Mississippi at the time, but the victims identified his photograph and he was arrested.

To ask the judge to set aside the verdict, Jackson typed out a declaration in proper legal form with the help of a friend who works in the courts. The 13-page document elaborates the reasons she changed her mind.

In imposing sentence Wednesday, the judge made only passing reference to the juror’s petition and commended the defense attorney--whom Jackson had criticized. “This was a planned, premeditated, sophisticated robbery,” Long said, agreeing with the prosecutor that Cotton should have been found guilty of the Queen Mary robbery as well.

Outside court, a shaken Jackson condemned “the system,” and said she still believes she had not overstepped her role.

“I’m not passing the buck and I’m not saying I’m irresponsible . . . but I have a right to look into it if what I’m saying is putting someone in jail,” she said.