Update

[moon_custafer]

Didn't get picked for jury duty. Ran into my mother and her sister on the way home, and we stopped for coffee and cake. So, not a bad day.

ETA -- not being picked for jury duty means I can now look up the case in question:

The arrests were followed by a break in the case of Neil "Gooby" Armstrong, who was shot and killed outside Inside Night Club on Richmond Street West in 2003. The investigation was hampered by the lack of assistance from as many as 50 witnesses on the street that night. But it was people coming forward with information that resulted in the arrests of four young men, three of whom were youths at the time of the crime.

Also

Gandwimbi wasn't heard from again.

In 2003, he was a critical Crown witness in the slaying of Neil "Gooby" Armstrong. Four men were freed after their first-degree murder charges were withdrawn due to the unreliability of the witness and wanted killer Gandwimbi, who was on the lam.

So apparently that's why it had taken nearly ten years to come to trial.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

Well, not being picked for a jury in a (probably) gangland murder trial has it's advantages. At least that's how it seems to me after listening to a number of "Mr. District Attorney" episodes ;-)

I'm not surprised that it took 10 years for this to come to trial. I saw a show once in a series where the reporter spent a day with a homicide detective: one from a different country every episode. The one in Manhattan said that there were never any clues nor any witnesses and he only had a couple of hours to spend at any given scene before he had to rush off to the next one anyway. However he claimed that, in the long term, all gangland murderers were caught. The knowledge of their crimes was around in the underworld: perhaps in a very limited way at first but gradually expanding throughout it as a kind of currency as it became party of people's resumes or blackmail portfolios. The cops were always putting pressure on criminals about more recent, and usually much more minor, crimes and eventually it would seem like a good idea to someone to turn in someone in an old murder for some considerations in some safe cracking job or some such. A murder has the highest density of karma points down at the DA's so you only have to turn in one guy to get a pretty good plea bargain instead of a bunch of people who might find out about your betrayal. Best of all convicted murderers go away for a long time (sometimes forever if they get the chair!) so you don't have to worry about them in the immediate future.