What Happened to "Duff"?

Arthur Lee McDuffie, 33, was by all accounts an amiable, hardworking man. A former Marine, he was an associate manager with the Coastal States Life Insurance Co. in Miami. Though he divorced his wife Frederica in 1978, he remained close to her and their two daughters, Shederica, 9, and Dewana, 2, and he planned to remarry her later this year. "Duff," as friends called him, often took on odd jobs --managing a rock-soul band, running a carwash business --for extra money. "He was always working," said Frederica. "He dreamed of retiring at 42."

In the early morning of Dec. 17, a Dade County police sergeant spotted McDuffie speeding on his orange and black Kawasaki motorcycle. McDuffie, who had lost his driving license for paying a previous traffic fine with a bad check, gunned the cycle. According to police, he ran a series of red lights at speeds of up to 100 m.p.h. before he finally slowed down. By this time, more than a dozen policemen had closed in. The initial police report claimed that McDuffie's cycle had crashed, injuring him. This report also said that he fought off the police until they subdued him. By the time a fire department rescue truck arrived seven minutes later, McDuffie's face, according to one policeman there, "looked like it was sprayed with a can of red paint." McDuffie was still conscious but soon lapsed into a coma; he died four days later of head injuries.

Even before McDuffie died, investigators began picking apart the official version of what had happened. A departmental inquiry led to eight Dade County policemen being dismissed. Five went on trial on charges ranging from second-degree murder to tampering with evidence. They were Alex Marrero, Ira Diggs, Michael Watts, Eddie Del Toro and Herbert Evans Jr.

The trial began on March 31 in Tampa, having been moved out of Miami at the request of the defense. The policemen's lawyers also successfully challenged all potential black jurors; the result was a jury of six white males. Two policemen, Mark Meier and Charles Veverka Jr., testified for the prosecution in exchange for immunity, while a third, William Hanlon, was forced to appear after the charges against him were dropped. Their accounts made up the body of the state's case.

Meier, one of the first to arrive on the scene, said that Mc Duffie had said, "I give up," but some of the police beat him with their nightsticks and flashlights. Marrero then stood over the cyclist, now lying still on the ground, and hit him on the head with his nightstick, testified Meier. Added Veverka: "I got splattered with the blood." Hanlon testified that he himself then drove his squad car over the motor cycle to make it look as though the bike had crashed.

Marrero admitted hitting McDuffie, but contended that he had done so only because the black man grabbed for the policeman's gun. Defense Attorney Edward Carhart told the jury that the attack on McDuffie was like a "barroom brawl," but he argued that it was impossible to determine who had delivered the fatal blow. He also stressed inconsistencies in the testimony of the state's police witnesses.

After seven weeks of testimony, the jury took only two hours and 45 minutes to return a verdict: not guilty on all counts. Marrero broke into tears of relief. Said he: "It was an accident."

The jurors seemed to feel not only that the state had failed to prove its case, but that its witnesses appeared just as responsible for the killing as the defendants. "It wasn't fair to send one person to prison while others just as guilty were going free," said Jury Foreman David Fisher, an air-traffic control specialist at Tampa airport. Fisher insisted that there was no racial favoritism in the verdict, then added: "But the black community won't look at it this way." He was right.

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