Twelve hours after hearing a jury find Calvin Hutson guilty on four criminal charges filed after the Dec. 27, 2012, murder of Andre Hudson, Cole County Prosecutor Mark Richardson praised the law enforcement efforts that provided the details used to present the case to that jury.
"Fortunately, our police department and law enforcement officers immediately responded, and through their investigation - which was thorough - were able to bring the true facts to the jury," Richardson told reporters Friday morning.
A seven-man, five-woman jury took just over 10 1/2 hours Thursday to decide that Hutson, 36, St. Louis, was guilty of second-degree murder, attempted first-degree armed robbery, armed criminal action and unlawful possession of a weapon.
Hutson's public defender, Kevin Lorenz of Columbia, argued no murder occurred because Hutson had met Hudson for a drug transaction and Hudson had fired first - so that Hutson's returning fire, including the shot that killed Hudson, was an act of self-defense.
But Richardson had told the jury the drug deal was just a means of getting Hudson, 41, Holts Summit, into a place where he could be robbed of the marijuana he was carrying.
And Hudson's murder came eight months and five days after Columbia drug dealer Keith Mosely, 34, was killed in a Buena Vista Street apartment during another robbery attempt that had started with a proposal to buy marijuana from the victim.
"It seems that, in the last many years, drug-driven crimes account for approximately 90 percent, or more, of the work we do in the prosecutor's office," Richardson said Friday. "Of course, I'm talking about illegal drugs, people addicted to illegal drugs, people buying and selling illegal drugs, and people attempting to rob others of illegal drugs - or of the money they've gained from illegal drug sales.
"That entire group - including the addicts who go and commit crimes to obtain money to buy the illegal drugs - I believe account for about 90 percent of our crime."
It's a substantially bigger problem than alcohol-related crimes, Richardson said, and "has been, I believe, consistent for my years as a prosecutor and a prior municipal judge."
Richardson is in his eighth year as Cole County's prosecutor, and previously had served almost eight years as Jefferson City's municipal judge.
In his 2006 campaign for prosecutor, Richardson had talked about "sophisticated drug dealers who not only supply drugs, but also bring in crime."
Because the law requires prosecutors to focus on the present crime in trying to convict a defendant, the prosecution isn't allowed to bring up any past crimes unless the defendant testifies - and Hutson did not take the witness stand.
So Richardson could not tell the jury what he was able to report Friday morning: "At the time of this murder, this defendant (Hutson) had four prior felony convictions, and had just been out of jail (only) 17 days before he committed the murder."
Richardson was able to use police reports that included interviews with Hutson - who had been wounded in the shoot-out - and statements Hutson gave about what happened.
"Right after the murder, this defendant misled police, trying to claim that he was a victim of a random shooting," Richardson said Friday.
He told the jury during his closing arguments Thursday morning that the case really was a simple one - that Hutson planned a robbery, a felony crime punishable by up to a life prison sentence, and that Hudson died during a shoot-out inside a car, so his death under Missouri law also was a felony crime - second-degree murder - because it occurred during the commission of the first felony crime.
"When, as in this case, there's very thorough and competent police work done, it makes it very easy for the prosecutor's office to go into court and convey that information to a jury," Richardson said.
His office benefited from a number of circumstances that don't always occur with drug crimes, he added - it was inside the city limits, and police already on patrol were able to get to the scene quickly after the dispatchers received the 911 call from Marcy Hudson, the victim's wife, who was sitting in a Chevrolet Suburban parked next to the car where the shootings occurred.
"The difficulty, sometimes, in cases where drugs are involved is that those crimes do not occur in places where we would normally find witnesses we could automatically rely on," the prosecutor explained.
"And, therefore, the police have to go the extra mile to, many times, corroborate what any witness is telling us, so that we're able to show a jury, "Here's what the witness said, and here's why that witnesses' statement can be believed.'"
The case also benefited from more than 400 pictures the various responding officers took as they investigated the initial crime scenes, Richardson said, giving him the option of choosing which pictures best showed the jury what had happened.
While acknowledging the jury took a long time to reach its verdicts on the four charges, Richardson refused to guess what the concerns had been.
"What goes on in the jury room is for jurors only," he said. "And this prosecutor does not speculate, or guess, on what they do after they are given the instructions from the court."