Afrikaans
Akan
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bemba
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Cebuano
Cherokee
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Esperanto
Estonian
Ewe
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
Frisian
Ga
Galician
Georgian
German
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Kinyarwanda
Kirundi
Kongo
Korean
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Kurdish
Kurdish (Soranรฎ)
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Lozi
Luganda
Luo
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mauritian Creole
Moldavian
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Montenegrin
Nepali
Nigerian Pidgin
Northern Sotho
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Romanian
Romansh
Runyakitara
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Setswana
Seychellois Creole
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish (Latin American)
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tshiluba
Tumbuka
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate
yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the district
attorneys who prosecute the offenders.
These are their stories.
Whose house? Whose house?
Whose house? Whose house? Whose house? You were eaten tonight.
That paint belongs to you. What the hell are you doing out here? You will not
show disrespect like that! No!
No! Not here!
I should yank your head off!
Man,
you okay? Man, shut up!
He was in his pocket with some cash.
His name is Miles Booker, 20 years old, went to Piermont.
One GSW to the heart. Call came in at 9.38 p.m. Here, got one case in, nine
mil.
Knuckles of bruise, right hand.
You call this in?
That lady over there, she works at the check cashing store.
Only place on the block, open this late.
All right, thank you.
I heard two guys arguing.
Hooked my head out, see what's going on. I saw this guy, and, um...
A white guy.
Young? Old?
Couldn't see his face.
30, maybe?
They squared up, chest to chest, sort of, jawing at each other.
What were they saying?
One of them called the other a chump.
I haven't heard that word in a while. What is it, 1978?
Other than that, I couldn't make out words.
Then this dude punched the white dude in the face. Bam.
White dude went down, white dude pulls a piece, shoots this guy.
Gets up, runs off.
Did you make out any distinguishing features? Any little thing helps?
No, not in the dark.
Oh, wait, no, no. He was wearing a backpack.
It was like shiny, reflective stuff on it in the shape of a triangle. I saw it
in the streetlight when he ran off.
Once he was gone, I ran out.
This guy was already dead.
Two guys get into a fist fight. One guy's losing, decides fists aren't going
to cut it, takes it to the next level.
If you can't beat them, shoot them.
Yeah, no, I don't think that's the way it goes.
Unfortunately, our canvas for cameras was a bust.
The CCTV at that check cashing store has been down for a month.
Thank you. The camera down the block picked up a two-man argument right
before the shooting, but super grainy and far away.
I'm assuming facial reaction non-starter?
It ends before things got violent.
It's more than nothing, but less than something.
Talk to Miles Booker's parents on the phone.
They're on the way up from Baltimore where he grew up. You said if he had
anything weird going on lately?
Problems? No, nothing. They said he wasn't just a student at Piermont. He
was on the basketball team.
And they had a game against Fenwick last night. Huge rivalry.
Uh-huh.
Well, Piermont won big last night.
And the game ended at 8.53 p.m.
Miles was dead 45 minutes later, a quarter mile from the arena.
I can get access to the arena footage.
It's going to be a ton of it, so it might take a minute.
Meantime, that arena sound like a good place to start?
I liked Miles, but we had a tough relationship, too.
How so? How tough?
Well, not that tough, if that's what you're asking.
Miles was a star in high school, but this is a big-time program, and all
these kids were stars in high school.
Here, Miles is a bench guy, but he did not agree with that assessment.
He wanted more playing time.
He was frustrated.
Sometimes he lashed out. I mean, bonehead stuff.
What kind of stuff?
Well, last night, game's a blowout.
Next thing I know, one second left, he throws up a three and makes it.
Can't imagine the Fenwick players thought that was too cool.
Yeah, well, I didn't either.
So players get into it in the tunnel.
Miles takes some punches, gets a few back. I broke it up. Right. Think that
other kid went and got a gun, came back to finish what he started?
He did say this ain't over.
Nick Snyder.
NYPD. Detective Walker, Detective Calvino.
Wanted to talk to you about Miles Booker.
Yeah, I heard about it on the socials.
Sucks. Yeah, we heard about the fight.
Did what I had to do.
You got a gun, Nick?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don't think I had anything to do with that? Yeah, we just
connect dots.
That's all.
Look.
Yeah, maybe I was pissed after the game.
But if you thought I was pissed about that stupid shot, just check out what
they're saying on WeWager.
What's WeWager?
The prediction market.
Nick Snyder's alibi checks out. He was right about WeWager.
So the betting line had Paramount winning by 19.
Paramount was winning by 18 as the clock wound down.
As Miles Booker throws up that prayer, Paramount wins by 21, he blows the line.
First place your mind goes if he was caught up in some gambling thing. I hear
you, but I don't know, man.
Box score said he played nine minutes. Five points, two boards. It's tough to
throw a game with those numbers. Wait, guys.
Look at this WeWager pin board.
You won't believe the flood of hate that Booker got.
Oh, that garbage shot cost me my mortgage payment. That scrub ruined my
weekend. All this for a 20-year-old kid? Damn.
Oh, even in this sewer of humanity, one guy stands out.
This guy claims to have lost 40K.
Going to find Miles Booker on the street. I'm going to teach that punk
about a different kind of shot.
That guy posted that from the game.
He was there. Saw the shot go in. We know his handle on WeWager, but who the
hell is he in real life?
Going to find Miles Booker on the street. Going to teach that punk about a
different kind of shot.
Outrageous. Truly.
Yeah. We need a name.
We need to know who made that threat.
Can't help you there. Sorry.
So it doesn't bother you?
Athletes getting death threats on your platform?
Moral decay is baked into my business model only because the demand exists.
That we didn't create.
If someone predicts the next 9-11 on WeWager makes a fortune, more power to
them, and the bigger my cut.
That math is contingent upon one thing.
Anonymity.
Thank you for stopping by, friends.
Well, just one problem. We're talking about a person of interest in a murder
investigation.
So refusing to cooperate violates know your customer laws.
We have no choice but to report it to the CFTC Yeah, see all that math you
were talking about. I think that's contingent on you still being in
business friend Understand you own a
Smith & Wesson handgun. Mr. Barrett CSX.
Yeah
Registered, legal.
People use legal guns to do illegal things, sir.
So we got a shell casing, and the bullet was fired from a gun that was made by
one of two manufacturers. Now, the first one's a Glock, and I'm gonna let you
guess what the second one is.
Miles Booker's basket at the end of the game cost you 40 grand.
People have killed for a lot less.
Look, I was not happy about that stupid shot, okay? That is true.
I went looking for Booker after the game. That's true, too. Okay.
Okay, you have a plan?
I don't know.
Raise hell.
Then what?
Change of heart?
I saw him outside the arena. He was with some kid.
What kid?
Some kid. Like, doesn't even shave kind of dude.
They seemed tight, but the kid looked scared or bummed out.
Miles was, like, talking to him, taking him really serious.
Then what'd you do?
Nothing, bro. I was like, what, I'm just gonna go sucker punch this guy while
he's straightening out this kid?
Went to Bub O'Malley's instead.
Had a heart-to-heart with my friend Jack Daniels.
I swear.
Barrett's telling the truth. He was at Bub's, drinking his feelings.
Well, we found the mystery, kids.
Yeah, over here.
If Booker exits the arena at 925, this kid's waiting outside.
Can you zoom in a little bit? Right there in the jacket.
Go on, it's high.
Brooklyn.
They're Diamondback Terrapins. They live in the Gowanus Canal. I mean, they got
like three eyes because of that water, but you know, they're cool.
And these are things that you know?
Want to go find a kid?
How do you know Miles Booker?
I met Miles two years ago at summer basketball camp.
Marymount College?
He was like a mentor, I guess.
He looked out for me.
What were you guys talking about last night?
We heard you upset.
That night, I was walking to the game, and then this white guy came out of
nowhere yelling at me crazy stuff.
Crazy how?
Racist.
I mean, he had his phone out filming the whole thing.
He wouldn't leave me alone.
So I panicked, and I ran all the way to the arena.
That's what you told Miles after the game?
Yeah.
And he told me he was pardoning me for walking away, and he called me an Uber
to go home.
Is that it?
Except he asked where it happened, and he pulled up a picture of the guy on the
cell, and I said, yeah, that's him.
What did he say?
That he was going to take care of it.
According to Booker's cell phone data, after he sent Elijah home, he pulled up
Riot Wire.
A crypto-based streaming platform that hosts influencers.
Mostly the ones that get kicked off other platforms.
Whose page did you visit?
Stone Freedom.
Who? He's an internet celebrity.
His real name's Tyler Duncan.
He's a professional racist.
I'm sorry, he's a what?
Hey, what? Right here. Where you going? Where you going?
Look what I found, huh? Look, I found one, guys. Look what I found.
Hey, get that camera out of my face, man.
Come on, say something.
Move on. Move on. Or what? What are you going to do?
Hey, cornbread, I'm talking to you. Come on, smile for the camera.
Hey.
This mutt gets off on this?
Oh, this mutt makes money on this. There's a few of these out there.
A guy named Chud the Builder's another one. Says the most outrageous stuff for
views. But our guy here, Stone Freedom, his videos get like two, what, 300,000
views? His fans think he's a hero, some sort of anti-woke First Amendment
warrior. You got a sheet?
No, he's never been arrested.
But guess where he was doing his thing the night of the murder?
Four blocks from the crime scene.
Open up, NYPD.
Tyler Duncan?
That's me.
Can I help you fellas? We have a warrant to search the premises.
Do you?
Huh?
Come on in.
Hey, Tyler, you bump into this guy in Sugar Hill last night?
Uh, yeah, I don't know, man. You know, uh, faces, you know. Right.
We all look the same.
No, no, those are your words, man, not mine.
Jeez.
You always this sensitive, bro? No.
I'm not your bro.
Got it.
Turn around push your hands behind your back first first first say hello to the
freedom fighters boys Yeah, it's finally happening the woke stoppo's trying to
silence me turn it off Nah, man, white guys can't be too careful these days
now. Hey, I got rights. I got rights, right?
Tyler Duncan, you're under arrest for the murder of Miles Lee Booker. You have
the right to remain silent. Do you understand? You have the right to
consult an attorney. Do you understand?
That's you, Tyler.
Climbing into your car.
Two minutes after the murder.
Three blocks from where it happened.
Our witness says the killer was wearing this backpack.
Which we found in your apartment.
Come on, man. We know you did this.
I don't know what you're talking about.
All right.
I want to hear your side.
Oh, you think silence is your friend.
It's not.
If something happened that might help explain this, now's the time to talk.
Get the ballistics report back from the gun we found in your apartment Dead
match from the slug we recovered from the body. It's the murder weapon It's
over Tyler I want a lawyer
Good luck to you
Your Honor, the defendant is charged with murder in the second degree. On the
night of September the 2nd, Mr. Duncan shot and killed Miles Booker, an unarmed
man, a good young man, an athlete, a beloved son, and a mentor.
He then fled the scene and concealed the weapon.
We have an eyewitness, we have physical and forensic evidence, and we ask for
remand. The defendant has a public platform with large following,
fundraisers on his behalf. He presents a flight risk.
Mr. Dressler. Your Honor, the reason my client has such passionate support is
that he is innocent.
We will show that the aggressor in this incident was Miles Booker. He hunted
down my client, struck him, advanced on him. In that moment, Mr. Duncan
reasonably believed his life was in imminent danger and acted in self
-defense. Your Honor, bail is appropriate here.
Mr. Duncan is an entrepreneur with no criminal record, long-standing ties...
Mr. Duncan is an entrepreneur to the degree that he runs a social media
platform built around confronting strangers with hateful language.
Save your breath. The defendant's remanded.
Next case. This is a travesty of justice!
USA! USA!
USA!
USA! USA!
USA! USA! USA!
Mr. and Mrs. Booker, don't let this turn into a circus.
Just get justice for our son.
If the races were reversed, the DA would not have brought charges.
Anyone with eyes and a brain can see that. Do you have any other questions?
Tom Phillips is making a cause out of Tyler Duncan.
A match made in hell.
Is this all hot air or is there substance to the self-defense claim?
We don't know exactly what was said, but we know from our eyewitness, the two men
argue. After a few minutes, Miles strikes Tyler Duncan in the face.
Duncan falls, pulls out a gun, shoots Miles Booker dead.
It will hammer the proportionality gap.
A punch and a fatal gunshot occupy very different tiers of violence.
Did Duncan have an opportunity to retreat?
Yes, and a duty to retreat.
And he showed consciousness of guilt. He didn't call 911, fled the scene, went
home, hid the murder weapon by duct-taping it to the underside of his
toilet lid.
This is murder.
You don't get to incite violence and then use it as a pretext to get away
with killing someone.
Duncan has a long history of goading black men into verbal and physical
confrontations, all on video, which speaks to motive. We will show that to
the jury, too. Well, maybe.
Defense is challenging the videos.
I get it.
How many of those are there?
We've counted 152 on various streaming platforms so far.
Just so I'm clear, this Stone Freedom, that's the alter ego of your client
Tyler Duncan?
Yes, Judge.
And you're okay with all this?
God, no.
But if we truly believe in the law, then my discomfort is not a sign I'm doing
something wrong. It's a sign I'm doing something right.
That's the whole reason we're here, in fact.
Because our system of law doesn't ask whether a defendant is a good person.
But Mullineaux is clear.
Evidence of prior bad acts is presumptively inadmissible. Even if this
case was about race, and it's not.
Yes.
My client says hurtful, terrible things.
But in this case, he was attacked.
and believed he had to resort to deadly force.
Your Honor, we're not offering the videos as prior bad acts. They are
direct evidence of motive and the falsity of the self-defense claim
itself. These confrontations are not spontaneous.
They are a business plan.
They're relevant to whether this encounter was an ambush that left Tyler
Duncan genuinely afraid for his life or part of a deliberate pattern.
I hear that.
But suggesting a defendant's general disposition as evidence is inherently
prejudicial. It runs the risk that we convict someone for who they are.
It seems to me, and I think this is what you were getting at too, the vile nature
of Tyler Duncan's conduct only makes the legal protection more critical, not
less. Your Honor, we're not... That's the decision, Mr. Price.
The videos are out.
A 152.
If the judge won't allow the videos, I'll do her one better.
How's that?
Let's supersede the indictment by charging Tyler Duncan with a hate crime.
That way, the defendant's bigotry speaks to his state of mind.
It's no longer propensity evidence, so Molyneux can't touch it.
It's creative.
Obviously, Tyler Duncan is a bigot. The jury should know that one way or
another. I'm sensing a butt coming.
Butt?
Based only on the direct evidence we have in hand right now, do we know that
race was a motivating factor in this murder?
Not really.
My gut says Miles Booker died because he was black.
I'll sleep just fine with a hate crime.
Do it.
Go back to the grand jury, add the hate crime, find Duncan's other victims, put
them all on the stand.
Show this jury exactly who this son of a bitch really is.
I was walking home from the hospital in bedside, just minding my own business.
And what did you see?
There was more of what I hear.
I kept hearing these weird, like, monkey sounds or something.
Next thing I know, dude shoving his phone in my face, recording me.
So I told him, man, man, get out of here.
And he wouldn't listen. He kept chasing me around.
What are you going to do, boy? You're chimping out.
He flashes his gun.
He says, what are you going to do, boy?
I got 15 rounds for you, boy.
The words he says, they're not words.
They're like a hand around your throat, you know?
No, Elijah, I don't know.
I would do anything to make it stop.
You can't help but wonder if fighting is the only way.
But, Elijah, you didn't fight.
You didn't punch my client in the face, knock him to the ground, advance on him.
You walked away.
Yeah, but... It didn't turn to violence.
Until you told Miles Booker about it.
And Miles told you he was going to take care of it.
Now we know what he meant.
No. Sure we do.
He was going to kill my client. Not true.
He was only going to do what I was too scared to do.
Tell that man.
Go to hell.
Nothing further, Your Honor.
It was dead that night, and I poked my head out of the shop, and I saw that man
right there.
Mr. Duncan?
And a tall black guy.
That's him.
Your Honor, let the record reflect that the witnesses identified Miles Booker
and the defendant, Tyler Duncan.
Done. Go ahead. I heard Duncan call Miles a chimp.
And then? It was on.
Miles punched Duncan in the face.
Duncan went down. Miles took a step forward.
Duncan pulled a gun.
Shot him. Did you witness Mr. Duncan make an attempt to retreat or call for
help? No.
He just pulled a gun.
Shot. Did you witness Mr.
Duncan rendering aid to Mr. Booker after shooting him? Hell no. He just ran.
Thank you. Nothing further.
You told the police you heard the word chump.
Not chimp.
Yeah.
But now I know it was chimp. Who the hell says chump these days? You not only
told the police the word was chump, you told them you didn't know which man said
it. I realized I was wrong.
And how'd you come to this miraculous realization you must have viewed my
client's content?
Sure. It's been all over the place since the trial started.
And you're sure chimp?
You remember it more clearly today than you did 19 minutes after the murder when
the police interviewed you.
Sometimes things come back to you.
Or sometimes, when the world is determined to make things about race,
maybe a word starts to sound like the word everyone wants you to hear.
Objection. Withdrawn.
I've got nothing more, Judge.
Mr. Price?
People rest, Your Honor.
Hey, Alexis.
What was that?
What was what?
We told you in prep, stick to what you told the detective.
Maybe I ran with the assignment a little bit, but every word I said was the God's
honest truth.
Isn't that what you wanted?
Yes, but it... Once I saw that prick's videos, once I heard him singing chimp,
I knew that's what I heard too.
That man, Stone Freedom.
The only saving grace of this whole thing is that Miles Booker beat his ass
before he died.
Miles Booker just wouldn't take no for an answer.
What do you mean?
Well, he found me in the streets.
I was walking to my car, and he started yelling at me.
You know, say that to me. Say that stuff to me.
And I told him. I was like, no, dude.
I am off the clock, man.
And? He goes, you can't do what you do and clock out.
Followed by some words that I'm probably not supposed to say here.
And he started following me.
We trash talked each other for a little while.
And then out of nowhere, he hit me real, real hard.
And what were you thinking in that moment?
Yeah, not really much of a game plan.
On my back.
I can't really see well.
My ears are ringing. I'm tasting blood.
And he goes, get up. Get up right now. Get up right now. Let's finish this.
So what was I thinking?
I was thinking that a man double my size just hit me harder than I've ever been
hit. And I was sure he was going to kill me.
Did you consider retreating?
Where?
What? It was dark. My knees a mess. Where am I going?
Look, I had a fraction of a second to think.
And I just acted.
Did you call Miles Booker a chimp that night? No.
Did you want Miles Booker to die? No, I just wanted to go home.
Why'd you have the gun?
I get death threats every day.
People saying they're going to hunt me down.
Nothing further, Judge.
Mr. Price.
Had Miles Booker ever threatened your life?
No. And you'd never met him?
Correct.
Why do people threaten your life?
Because of what I do and the language that I use. The N-word.
Yeah. Boy.
Yes. So you use the most hateful words in the English language routinely for
profit, but the one time somebody finally punches you in the face for it,
you want us to believe you are all peaches and cream?
I get how that sounds, and I wouldn't believe me either.
You heard the man.
But you have to understand that Stone Freedom is just a character that I made
up. Character? Yeah.
I didn't have a lot of opportunity growing up.
Okay, my mother died when I was a kid. I was in and out of foster care. I didn't
do too good at school.
So I always had a hustle to make ends meet.
And I stumbled upon this weird little lane in the internet.
But I'm an entertainer.
A provocateur, whatever.
And there is a long tradition of guys like me. I'm sorry, you believe that
what you do is entertaining?
Call it whatever you would like.
But comedy, entertainment, take a guy like Andy Kaufman. Or Andrew Dice Clay.
Even Howard Stern. The character that he plays on the radio, that's just part of
his gag.
Are you trying to tell this jury you're not a racist?
Yes. That is exactly what I'm trying to say.
Tyler Duncan is... I'm not a racist, okay? But Stone
Freedom is a racist.
But when Miles approached me, I wasn't filming.
So... He was talking to me.
Tyler Duncan.
I see. So you switched your racism on and off.
Yeah, sort of.
Luckily for us, it doesn't matter what character you were playing that night.
What does matter is that you, the person sitting directly in front of me, shot
and killed an unarmed young man named Miles Booker. Yes, in self-defense
because I was afraid he was going to kill me.
All Miles did was punch you. He didn't even jump on you when you were down on
the ground. He told you to get up so you could finish your fist fight.
You weren't afraid. You just wanted to kill a black man.
Objection. Sustained.
Ms. Cook, how long have you been married to Tyler Duncan?
We went to Martin High together in New Jersey.
Got together after we graduated.
Got married.
It'll be two years in spring.
Like Mr. Duncan, you are a social media influencer by trade.
Yeah. We both came from the dirt.
But we're online savvy. We created our characters.
What's your character?
My name is Ava Star.
So beautiful that life is hard.
If the conceit of your character is that being beautiful is hard...
People must be upset.
That's the whole point. Get people mad.
Mr. Duncan uses the same model. Of course.
He's not racist, if that's what you mean.
I wouldn't tolerate that.
And neither would my family.
I have two little brothers, and they're with us a lot.
And he's awesome with them.
Thank you.
Nothing further.
As a black woman, you're comfortable being with someone who says hurtful,
hateful things about black people for profit?
Are you telling me how to live my life, Mr. Price?
Let me put it another way.
The mere fact that Mr. Duncan is nice to your family does not mean he's not a
racist.
It's like saying, I'm not a racist. I have lots of black friends.
When my grandmother got sick last year, Tyler figured out a way how to ship
turnip greens on dry ice.
Back from when she grew up in Houston.
When she ate them, she cried.
Cried.
You do those sort of things for your black friends, Mr. Price?
I didn't think it was possible, but the defense made a pretty compelling case
that Tyler Duncan is not actually a bigot. He just plays one on social
media. That's better.
The average age of our jury is 28.
Young people understand nothing you see online is true. It's all an act.
This distinction the defense is making is less surprising to those jurors than
it is to you.
We can't ignore the fact that we haven't documented a single instance in which
Tyler Duncan has said or done anything racist when the cameras aren't rolling.
When the camera's on, that's when he becomes Stone Freedom. Right. So we
might not be doing ourselves any favors by insisting that Stone Freedom shot
Miles Booker. It was Tyler Duncan. And to the jury, there might be a
difference. I feel like I'm going crazy.
Pretending to be a racist because it's profitable.
is one of the few things more offensive than being a racist in the first place.
That's odd.
The fence wants to call a new witness, somebody we never heard about before.
Now? Some guy named Barry Vaughn.
Supposedly, he heard Miles threaten Tyler Duncan's life.
My name's Barry Vaughn. I work at a bar in Sugar Hill, Coogan's.
Two blocks from the location of the incident that night.
I was bussing tables.
This was 9.30.
This black guy walks up.
Yeah, that's him.
He had Stone Freedom Stream pulled up on his phone. He was looking for him.
Asked a couple customers. They said, yeah, you're just missing. He went down
the block that way.
And before Mr. Booker left to hunt down Mr.
Duncan, what did he say?
He said, I'm going to put that son of a bitch in the ground.
Nothing more.
Your witness, Mr. Price.
You tell anyone about any of this before today?
Like a friend, a roommate?
No. A lot of people. I mean, dare I say, most people, if they hear someone make a
death threat, they call the police.
I didn't think it was my business.
Then what made it your business, Mr. Vaughn?
After all this time.
Tom Phillips has been talking about this case for a while.
I'm a fan.
But he believes there's a real injustice being committed here. Holding a man
accountable for taking another man's life? Heaven forbid.
Objection. Sustained.
Phillips said the other night this case is going to come down to the wire.
Anyone with information that could help Stone Freedom, sorry, Tyler Duncan,
should stand up.
So you found the courage.
And there's no record of this memory. So until Tom Phillips, a carnival barker
with a well-documented aversion to the truth, begged you to come to Stone
Freedom's rescue... Objection, Judge.
Sustained.
You'd never met Miles Booker before that night.
Correct. So you have no sense of his temperament, his way. You can't tell us
if he was being hyperbolic or venting, joking.
Didn't sound like a joke.
Not that you would know.
Nothing further.
We knew from the get-go not all the facts were convenient here.
We're past that.
Please tell me you're not asking me to feel empathy for Tyler Duncan.
Hell no. No.
It's not about empathy.
Um, it's about the law, Nick.
It is possible that no matter how much we might despise Duncan, that strictly
by the letter of the law, this was self-defense.
So what's the play?
We push to include manslaughter as a lesser included offense.
That way the jury doesn't have to conclude that Duncan wasn't afraid, just
that his fear didn't justify deadly force.
It's not perfect.
Hey, you need to see this.
So, after Barry Vaughn's surprise testimony, I tracked down the recording
of Tom Phillips asking his listeners for help.
Phillips mentioned that he first bonded with Duncan during a podcast appearance,
so I subpoenaed...
The raw recordings from the podcast unaired stuff.
And?
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate that.
No, I didn't think we were going to get you. I mean, you do some outrageous
stuff. The Big Apple is ripe.
You got to admit, though, killing one would be badass.
Making the world safer, one brother at a time. Of course.
Are you kidding me? That's the dream, right?
Make money and get a free kill?
Seven weeks before the murder. That's intent.
He just said killing a black man is a bonus.
Tyler Duncan thought he'd found a loophole. Thought he'd figured out a way
to get away with murder.
In a self-defense case, this is the holy grail.
You're right.
Who knows if he really meant it or not. We know Tyler exaggerates when he's
pretending to be Stone Freedom.
Does it matter?
Making the world safer, one brother at a time. Of course. Are you kidding me?
That's the dream, right?
Make money and get a free kill?
Your Honor, these words discovered by the people might sound shocking on their
face. But this was a moment of dark humor, bravado. It does not reflect
Tyler Duncan's state of mind at the moment of the shooting, which is the
only legally relevant moment in a justification defense.
Wrong. Your Honor, this obliterates both the subjective and objective planks of
the defense.
A man who planned and hoped for circumstances that would allow him to
kill can't then claim that he was an unwilling victim of necessity when those
circumstances occur. This was the plan, the mission.
He was letting off steam, trying to fit in. Your Honor, we now know that Tyler
Duncan was not a reasonable person responding to a threat. He was an armed
man executing a premeditated plan, wearing the language of self-defense as
a disguise.
We know that.
And the jury must know that, too.
Members of the jury, I understand you've reached a verdict.
We have, Your Honor.
How do you find the defendant, Tyler Duncan, on the charge of murder in the
second degree?
Guilty or not guilty?
We find the defendant guilty.
As to whether the defendant committed this offense in whole or substantial
part because of a belief or perception regarding the race of the victim, how do
you find?
People have also proven this beyond a reasonable doubt.
The defendant is also guilty of a hate crime. This is an outrage!
Righteous! Order!
Order! Order!
Order! We will not tolerate outbursts in this courtroom!
I love you.
I'm sorry.
Are you okay?
Thank you.
Thank you for giving us some sense of peace. Of course.
Let me walk you out.
Okay.
Nice work.
Tyler Duncan got what he deserved in the eyes of God and the law.
Damn right he did.
Let's go get a drink.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.