Foreman says beauty queen jury believed self-defense argument

<p>The foreman of a jury that acquitted former beauty queen Nicole "Nikki" Redmond of murdering her boyfriend says the panel believed she was acting in self-defense and that the shooting victim may not have died with quicker medical care.</p><p>The jury of nine women and three men deliberated for a little more than nine hours last month before finding Redmond innocent in the 2003 shooting death of Kevin Shorter.</p><p>She had been named Miss Savannah four months earlier.</p><p>Redmond admitted shooting her boyfriend outside the home of another woman he was dating but said she thought he was reaching for a gun. Police said he did not have a weapon.</p><p>But the Rev. Frank Wilson Jr., pastor of the Holy Zion Pentecostal Church, said he and his fellow jurors felt differently.</p><p>"We feel like he had a gun," said the Rev. Frank Wilson Jr. in an interview earlier this week. "He took the gun with him when he hobbled on into the house."</p><p>Wilson also said jurors were swayed by defense testimony that bleeding caused by a mistake at a hospital may have led to Shorter's death, not a bullet wound.</p><p>"He died from the nick in his chest," Wilson said, referring to a wound defense lawyers said was caused at Memorial Health University Medical Center. "It is the negligence at the hospital that killed him."</p><p>Hospital CEO and President Bob Colvin said Wilson and his fellow jurors would have reached "different conclusions" if his trauma surgeons had testified.</p><p>"With all due respect to the legal process, I don't understand why that, when this subject was raised by the defense during the trial, our trauma surgeons weren't called to testify by the prosecution," Colvin said.</p><p>Colvin said that when Shorter arrived at the hospital, "for all intents and purposes, this individual was dead."</p><p>Wilson said jurors discussed a willingness to consider manslaughter or reckless endangerment charges, but couldn't since prosecutors did not bring them before the jury.</p><p>"They charged her with the wrong charges," Wilson said. "And because of that, we had to acquit her. She did not murder him."</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x286695c)</p>

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