May 21, 2008 12:10 am
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By JUSTIN SCHNEIDER andSHAWN McGRATH
newsroom@heraldbulletin.com
ANDERSON — It took a jury of six men and six women less than 30 minutes to find Jesse Lee Pitts guilty Tuesday of beating an Anderson High School freshman to death at a city park.
Wearing a green-and-white-striped jail jumpsuit, and with his hands shackled to a chain wrapped around his waist, Pitts bowed his head as the jury returned to the courtroom with its verdict. His head remained lowered and he closed his eyes when Madison Superior Court 3 Judge Thomas Newman read the guilty decision.
The jury went into deliberations shortly before 2:30 p.m., and returned about 25 minutes later. Pitts was found guilty of beating to death 14-year-old Amanda Brinker with a jack handle at Edgewater Park on Sept. 20.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Madison County Prosecutor Thomas Broderick Jr. said of the quick verdict. “We had a lot of strong evidence. The evidence was clear.
“I figured it would be a quick verdict because of the nature of the evidence.”
Anderson attorney Jason Childers, Pitts’ public defender, didn’t return messages seeking comment after the verdict was announced.
Pitt faces 45 to 65 years in prison when Newman sentences him at 9 a.m. Monday, June 9, and Broderick said he will ask for the maximum.
The closings
The defense and prosecution delivered their closing statements with a photograph of Brinker projected on the courtroom screen. With her arms folded, Brinker leaned against a white brick wall, a wry smile across her face.
Childers urged jurors to judge the case, not Pitts.
“Amanda’s death was tragic,” Childers said. “But this case is not about whether you like Jesse Pitts. ... This trial is about one thing: Has the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesse killed Amanda Brinker.”
Instead, Childers suggested that Pitts assisted police by making the initial 911 call, guiding them to his bloodied shirt and the alleged murder weapon. He questioned a decision to exclude a bicycle from the crime scene and to allow an unauthorized person inside the crime scene.
Broderick rejected claims by Pitts that the death of Brinker was an accident.
“The defendant attacked Amanda,” Broderick said. “He struck her not once, not twice, but six or seven times.”
Pitts did not take the stand during the six-day trial, but in video interviews from the Anderson Police Department, he frequently changed his story. During interviews, Pitts variously claimed that he never saw Brinker that day, that the two were jumped at Edgewater Park, that he tripped her and caused her injuries, then that he struck her accidentally with the jack handle police identified as the murder weapon.
“There was a metal pipe laying down in the bike trails, I picked it up and I was swinging it,” Pitts said, gesturing as if to indicate a pipe 12 to 14 inches long. “I turned around to look at the bike trail to see if someone was following me, I hit her and she dropped.”
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