By Brendan Browne
The six-week trial of Christopher Prince, accused of shooting and paralyzing a St. John’s football player last year, ended in a hung jury Friday, forcing the Queens district attorney’s office to make plans to try the defendant again in the fall.
After four days of deliberations in State Supreme Court in Long Island City, Justice Joel Blumenfeld declared a mistrial after jurors failed to break their 9-to-3 deadlock in favor of conviction.
“You get one person on a jury that’s adamant and you’ve got a hung jury,” said a clerk for Blumenfeld.
The new trial will begin Oct. 15, the clerk said.
Prince, 23, who remains out on $100,000 bail, is accused of shooting St. John’s star linebacker Cory Mitchell in the spine and Rashon Fray in the leg on the university’s campus March 11, 2001.
Prince, of Elmont, L.I., will be tried again on three counts of attempted murder and several counts of assault. He could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
The jury’s foreman passed three or four notes to Blumenfeld during deliberations to inform him they were deadlocked, the clerk said. After several hours of testimony were read back to jurors, they still could not reach a unanimous decision.
“I’m not pleased. We’re going to have to go to trial again,” said Prince’s attorney, Oliver Smith.
A spokeswoman in the Queens DA’s office said prosecutors “will be ready for trial again.” She said Assistant District Attorney Laurie Neustadt, who led the prosecution, will also handle the new trial.
During the trial, six witnesses, including Mitchell, 23, pointed to Prince as the shooter. The prosecutor said the shooting resulted from an altercation at Traditions, a bar on Hillside Avenue near St. John’s in Jamaica.
According to testimony in the trial, when Eric Mateo, a former friend of Prince’s, bumped into Mitchell’s friend Durron Newman at the bar, a confrontation began.
Newman and Mitchell, who were working as bouncers at Traditions, traded stares with Mateo and his friends after the bump, witnesses testified. When the bar closed early in the morning on March 11, Mateo and his friends followed Mitchell’s group back to campus, according to testimony.
After words were exchanged at the university’s campus, five shots were fired into a crowd, hitting Mitchell and Fray once each, witnesses testified.
Defense attorneys told jurors that Prince was not present at Traditions or the shooting. Prince’s sister, Michelle, and his girlfriend, Anita Mercado, testified that he was at his Elmont home at the time of the shooting.
Smith also told jurors during closing arguments that there were many discrepancies in the testimony given by the prosecution’s witnesses. Only two witnesses, he said, placed Prince at Traditions and he contended that witnesses’ accounts of the words the shooter used prior to firing differed.
Smith also said Prince had no motive to carry out the shooting and maintained the police work in the case was incomplete. Although five of the prosecution witnesses picked Prince out of a lineup, they never provided descriptions of the shooter to police.
Mitchell, paralyzed from the waist down, has been in rehabilitation near his home in Yonkers since the shooting.
Reach reporter Brendan Browne by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com or by phone at 229-0300, Ext. 155.
