Speak­ing out­side De­part­ment 28 to­day the vic­tim’s part­ner Brian Hig­gin­botham lamented the fail­ure of the jury to reach a ver­dict as to De­cuir and Mims.

“They are both guilty of first de­gree mur­der,” he said. “They killed Ed in cold blood and went on al­most to com­mit an­other mur­der less than two weeks later.” …

While they did not dis­pute that their client fired the shot that killed Mr French, de­fense at­tor­neys ar­gued that, at the time of the killing, Ms De­cuir was in a “sickle cell cri­sis” and suf­fer­ing from opi­ate painkiller with­drawal.

They added that Ms De­cuir had a low IQ, a “lack of adap­tive func­tion­ing” and suf­fers from stress and anx­i­ety. As a con­se­quence, they said, she did not act “con­sciously” when fir­ing the gun.

She was “un­aware of what is go­ing on,” at­tor­ney Mark Iver­son told the jury, “She is mov­ing, but with­out con­scious thought.”

Sum­ming-up, pros­e­cu­tor Heather Tre­visan dis­missed claims of lack of con­scious­ness: “mak­ing a plan with some­one else to go to a tar­get-rich en­vi­ron­ment [and] to leave [Mr French] alone to die on the street while you go to fence the cam­era” sug­gested to the con­trary, she said. …

One ju­ror spoke of “per­sonal ten­sion” among those de­lib­er­at­ing.

With re­spect to Mr French’s death, the only guilty ver­dicts aris­ing from the day’s events, that the jury could agree, re­lated to Mims: a sin­gle count of ‘sec­ond de­gree rob­bery’ and a count of ‘con­tempt of court’—be­cause, by be­ing on Twin Peaks, he vi­o­lated a stay-away or­der pre­vi­ously im­posed.

The pair were both found not guilty of ‘in­flict­ing in­jury on an el­der’ as re­gards Mr French. The read­ing of this ver­dict for Ms De­cuir caused a mem­ber of the French fam­ily to im­me­di­ately leave the court­room. …

Six days be­fore the killing, La­m­onte Mims, al­ready on felony pro­ba­tion, was re­leased on bail by Judge Sharon Rear­don af­ter be­ing ar­rested for gun pos­ses­sion and pa­role vi­o­la­tions.