A judge is considering whether Banita Jacks murdered her four daughters, after closing arguments Monday left a few ends open on both sides.
Jacks is charged with killing her girls, who ranged in age from 5 to 17. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg is deciding the case and expects to deliver a ruling by Wednesday morning.
Prosecutors say Jacks strangled her three youngest daughters and stabbed her eldest, then continued to live with the bodies for at least seven months. While carrying out an eviction in January 2008, officers found Jacks living with the bodies.
A lack of direct evidence left both sides scrambling for theoretical arguments Monday and clouding closings with minor details such as whether Jacks kept her blinds open or closed at her rowhouse in Southeast Washington.
Prosecuting attorney Michelle Jackson said in closing arguments that Jacks “connived, planned and premeditated to place these children in a prison of torture for months, culminating in their murder.”
She said Jacks deliberately secluded the girls because she planned to kill them and her “evasive behavior” — letting mail pile up, closing the blinds and ignoring house calls — in the months before she was arrested was evidence of her “conscious guilt.”
“She did this by design,” said Jackson.
Jacks, 35, faces life in prison if she is found guilty.
But defense attorney Peter Krauthamer said no evidence directly links Jacks to her girls’ death.
“When all is said and done, the government has not sustained its burden,” he said. “Ms. Jacks, for better or for worse, must be found not guilty.”
He offered no alternatives, however, for the girls’ cause of death. “No one knows exactly what happened,” he said. “A lot of things don’t make sense. But we don’t have to explain them, the government does.”
Jackson argued that the lack of food, furniture and clothing in the house points to neglect and abuse. She reiterated a medical examiner’s report determining the girls were slain and that three likely died by strangulation and one by stabbing.
But Krauthamer argued that the examiner’s report was unreliable. He said the bodies were too decomposed to determine cause of death and that the examiners were biased against Jacks because of the sensational nature of the crime.
Besides, he argued, if the girls were murdered neighbors would have heard something unusual. Krauthamer emphasized the “paper-thin” walls at Jacks’ Sixth Street home. “There was no blood on the walls or window, no shrieking and yelling…no crying, howling in pain” from any of the girls, he said.
But neighbors did smell the foul odor proliferating from the decomposing bodies inside Jacks’ house, Jackson said. “In August [2007] all the neighbors smelled it and they were looking for the source,” she said. No cries from the children means “absolutely nothing,” she said.
