By all accounts, one juror remained a holdout after nearly a week of heated jury deliberations in the trial last fall of the man accused of the September 2006 slaying of Metra police officer Thomas Cook.
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The juror, a retired Illinois Department of Corrections employee, refused to budge from his “not guilty” vote, according to several other jurors who spoke to reporters after Cook County Circuit Court Judge Frank Zelezinski declared a mistrial Oct. 16 after about 25 hours of discussion by the jury in the case against Jemetric Nicholson.
The state’s attorney’s office said it would retry Nicholson for Cook’s murder, and that second trial is scheduled to begin Wednesday at the county courthouse in Markham. Cook, 43, was shot twice in the back of the head as he sat in his police car near the Harvey Metra station.
Members of his family said this week they would likely not attend jury selection but will be present for the trial. For the Cooks, it’s not about seeing the accused killer imprisoned because Nicholson is already behind bars.
Nicholson, 28, is serving consecutive sentences at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill for, among other crimes, the attempted murder of a Harvey police officer the same day that Cook was killed. He won’t be eligible for parole for his other crimes until 2145.
“It will give my husband the honor that he had,” Cook’s wife, Pam, said of a conviction in speaking to reporters last fall. “I think that it will just help the family move on.”
Jurors who declined to be identified told the Daily Southtown last fall that the holdout juror had worked at Stateville before he retired. Attempts to track down the juror were unsuccessful. Information about jurors is sealed and not made public.
The juror reportedly indicated that he did not know Nicholson, even though he worked at Stateville during some of the time that Nicholson was incarcerated there, according to the other jurors.
Their inability to reach a unanimous verdict last fall took a visible toll on the jurors, many of whom looked more visibly shaken each time they were brought out of the jury room by the judge to determine how close they were to a verdict. Several were in tears when the jury foreman finally announced that they were unable to reach a unanimous decision.
None of the facts behind the case have changed. Nicholson, who had been in shootouts with a rival and with Harvey police less than 24 hours before Cook’s death, was on the hunt, looking for someone to rob when he came upon the officer’s squad car the night of Sept. 26, 2006, according to prosecutors.
A key state witness, Jeremy Lloyd, told jurors that he was serving as a lookout for Nicholson and watched as Nicholson fired a gun through Cook’s open squad car window.
Nicholson’s defense attempted to discredit Lloyd’s testimony, stressing that Lloyd had made a deal with prosecutors — pleading guilty to acting as the lookout in Cook’s death and for his role in the attempted murder of a Harvey police officer that same day in exchange for a lesser sentence and agreeing to testify against Nicholson. The defense also emphasized to the jury that Lloyd’s account of what happened the night Cook was slain had changed over the years.
Nick Swedberg is a freelance reporter.