FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The most relevant holdups on Thursday during the murder retrial of Dayonte “Moochie” Resiles’s retrial happened while the jury wasn’t present. Broward Circuit Judge John J. Murphy III had to consider two incidents involving jurors.
Prosecutors asked Murphy to dismiss a juror. A deputy saw the juror waving goodbye. Prosecutors said he was waving at Resiles, and defense attorneys said he was waving at everyone in the courtroom.
“The context of it was you said, ‘Goodnight’ and he lifted his hand at everyone,” said Allari Dominguez, a defense attorney. “He did not communicate, he just lifted his hand at everybody because it was the end of the day. That is not enough to remove a juror.”
Murphy also questioned a clerk who works in the jury room. There was a suspicion that on Wednesday that clerk broke a cardinal rule in the courthouse — do not to talk to jurors about a pending case.
The clerk told Murphy she didn’t realize she wasn’t allowed to and mentioned it in passing.
“I said, ‘Oh! I just saw that trial on the news this morning; something about a knife’”
Murphy will have to decide whether or not the jurors need to be replaced with alternates. He said he needs to look at case law to make a decision.
Once the jury returned to the courtroom, most of the testimony focused on forensics from the crime scene.
The Medical Examiner’s Office determined Jill Halliburton Su, 59, was stabbed and slashed more than 20 times with a knife in 2014. Her body was in her home at 10327 SW 22 Pl., in Davie’s Westridge gated community.
Resiles’s attorneys have been doing their best to pick apart the state’s evidence — even implying there are others who should be on trial for the murder.
Halliburton Su’s son, Justin Su, was briefly a suspect after he reported finding her dead on Sept. 8, 2014, in her bathtub.
Resiles’s DNA was on a knife and a bathrobe belt. Prosecutors accused him of killing Halliburton Su during a burglary.
The jury listened to Kevin McEflresh, a forensic DNA expert. They also listened to crime scene techs describe how they processed the evidence from the case, even showing how they swabbed the inside of a knife handle for DNA.
“In terms of your contact with Justin Su, every time you saw him, he wasn’t crying or saying anything, right?” Defense attorney Michael Orlando asked Eliza Shaw, a crime scene investigator.
“No, he was not,” Shaw said.
Shaw went on to describe what she remembered from the crime scene more than seven years ago.
“There were bloodstains on the floor. I noticed there were boxes and drawers that were open. There was jewelry on the floor,” Shaw said.
“Her legs were tied around with an electrical cord. Her arms were tied with a sash, the tie to the robe. I observed multiple stab wounds on her upper body.”
Resiles, now 27, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to death.
Local10.com archives
Coverage of the retrial
Coverage of last year’s mistrial