PENSACOLA, Fla. - A jury Friday acquitted a 16-year-old boy on murder charges, deciding that he acted in self-defense when he killed his uncle with a rusty butcher knife.

Daniel Carter, who was 15 when he killed 46-year-old Jack Carter, stood with his lawyer's arm around him and showed no emotion when the verdict was read, but his mother said she could see the relief in his eyes.

Cindy Carter said it was her son's decision to turn down a pretrial plea offer that would have guaranteed him a sentence of no more than 12 years and take the case to a jury. He risked an automatic sentence of life without parole if convicted of premeditated first-degree murder.

"Daniel, in his 15-year-old heart, believed if the jury could be put in his bedroom that night and understand everything that went on, that they couldn't convict him," she said.

He still faces a charge of attempting to escape from a juvenile detention center, but his mother said she would pay his $1,000 bond so he could come home Friday night and open his Christmas presents.

Daniel has spent two Christmases in the Escambia County Jail since being indicted as an adult following the July 16, 2002 killing at his mother's home in the nearby Beulah community. Part of the delay was caused when his first lawyer died in a plane crash on Daniel's 16th birthday, in June.

Jack Carter, a martial arts expert who lived at Navarre Beach, broke into and trashed Daniel's room, beat and kicked the boy and terrorized him by threatening to tie him up, strip him and castrate him, defense lawyer Patrece Cashwell said in her closing argument.

"Jack had a very strange idea about what constitutes discipline of a child," Cashwell told the jury. "The law says that's child abuse."

A defendant can be excused from homicide for killing to protect against child abuse and certain other crimes.

Assistant State Attorney David Rimmer offered jurors a starkly different picture of what happened. He said Jack Carter was a loving uncle trying to straighten out "an angry, out of control teenage boy with a chip on his shoulder, a knife in his hand and murder on his mind."

"Daniel has been freed from the lion's den," said Bishop Thomas Masters, one of several activists who attended the trial to support the teen and protest the adult prosecution of juveniles.

Masters is pastor of New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Riviera Beach and leader of Under Our Wings, a group that also opposes the death penalty for juveniles. He said he plans to return in a couple months to hold a conference on the adult prosecution of juveniles and may call for a tourism boycott of Florida until the state changes its laws.

Rimmer said after the verdict that it was a difficult case to prosecute because of Daniel's age and the fact he was in his home and his uncle had gone there to discipline him.

"The mother's the one who sicced the uncle on him, so what can you say," Rimmer said.

Cindy Carter testified she had asked her brother to have a "man-to-man" talk with her son because she was worried he was getting involved with drugs and he had rummaged through surfing magazines Jack Carter had stored in her barn.

She declined to comment on that matter after the verdict.

email this

print this