First her baby was killed. Then she was accused of murder. But on Monday, Tatiana Lima says, the truth finally came out.
“When she finally said, ‘I don’t find any evidence,’ I just wanted to collapse,” said Lima, a 27-year-old community activist.
Instead of sending the case to the jury, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams, a former prosecutor, directed a verdict for acquittal Monday. The exceptionally rare order signaled Adams did not believe the District Attorney’s Office had proven its case.
Directed verdicts are rare in criminal trials because they open up judges to criticism, and the rule is a judge should send a case to a jury if a “rational” juror could find a defendant guilty based on evidence.
Mawuli Davis, one of Lima’s defense lawyers, said prosecutors had suspicions about Lima only because of past injuries. The child’s father — Jeremy Copeland — pleaded guilty last week to killing the child. He told the court Lima never knew of any past abuse.
The baby, Akira, was one-month old when she died from a brain injury in 2010. She had already been treated for a broken leg and an autopsy showed other past injuries.
“The prosecutors said, ‘She had to know something,’ but you don’t prosecute a case on a hunch,” Davis said.
District Attorney Paul Howard blasted the acquittal, contending Lima knew of the abuse or at least neglected to get her child medical attention. In addition to the leg, the child had broken ribs, bruising and cuts to her neck. Her parents brought her to the hospital unconscious and barely breathing two weeks before the death, Howard said.
“This baby lived a tortured life, which no mother could have failed to notice,” he said.
Defense lawyer Kevin Farmer, who also represented Lima, argued social workers found no evidence of abuse when they investigated the broken leg — which happened in the father’s care — and doctors missed other injuries when Lima brought the child in for a check up a week before the killing. The father claimed in the hospital that he grabbed the leg when he dropped the baby.
Steve Sadow, a high-profile defense lawyer unaffiliated with the case, said prosecutors had hoped jurors would convict Lima by connecting dots based on their gut and not on facts. “The judge didn’t allow the jurors the chance to get emotional and convict,” he said.Copeland, 25, testified he slammed the baby to ground, fracturing her skull, when he “snapped” after he lost job, had to deal with a dirty diaper and he couldn’t get his video game to work, Davis said.
Lima, who now lives in Austell, said she has had no contact with Copeland since their baby’s death. She sang to her child after signing the order to disconnect the life support.
“That day haunts me still,” she said.
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