But the jurors were not only instructed to ignore events outside the courtroom; the judge also told them that they should not take into account the duration of any possible sentences. So they weren't to consider the fact that if Michael Tate were convicted of first-degree murder, he'd automatically go to prison for life.
The jurors, ten women and two men, deliberated for about 28 hours. Then, on the afternoon of Monday, September 10, they announced that they'd reached a verdict.
Michael Tate has few family pictures, but he has a mug shot.
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It was after 5 p.m. when the jury was finally reseated in the wooden jury box.
Tate had been charged with a long list of crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree, first- and second-degree burglary, criminal trespass, theft, criminal mischief and attempted aggravated motor vehicle theft. At the top of the list was first-degree murder. On that charge, the jury said they found Michael Tate not guilty — but not because of his insanity defense.
On the charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree, the jury found Michael Tate not guilty — but again, not because of his insanity defense.
On all of the other charges, including one for first-degree felony murder, the jury found Michael Tate guilty.
"I think that based on Dr. Hardy's testimony that Tate was insane, at least at the time of the murder, that there were a couple of us who agreed with that, which contributed to the delay on the deliberations," explains juror Bernadette Pistone. "But we're not sure who stabbed Steven Fitzgerald."
The prosecution didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Tate who wielded the knife, she says, and since the coroner had determined that the victim's wounds from one knife were the cause of death, the jury voted not to convict Tate on the first-degree-murder charge.
But the felony murder charge applies to a murder that occurs during the commission of another felony, such as a burglary, even if the defendant isn't necessarily guilty of delivering the fatal blows. (The most famous felony-murder conviction in Colorado was in the case of Lisl Auman; see "Zero to Life," April 15, 1999.) The jurors found Tate guilty of felony murder, Pistone says, because they felt that he did meet the legal standard for sanity when he decided to go along with the burglary of the Fitzgerald home — even though he might have been insane when the actual murder was committed.
More than a year ago, Pistone had seen a Frontline special about juveniles sentenced to life without parole in Colorado, but she followed the judge's admonition that jurors not do independent research or consider outside information when coming to a verdict.
A Human Rights Watch report cited in that special noted that about 2,278 people were doing life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles — 2,270 of them in the United States, and 45 of those in Colorado.
When he is sentenced in November, Michael Tate will become the 46th juvie serving a life sentence. Because like first-degree murder, felony murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
