Prosecutors: Jacks abused daughters

Prosecutors said they would call witnesses who would testify that Banita Jacks abused her four daughters before their deaths, as opening arguments got under way Wednesday afternoon in the quadruple murder trial.

Jacks, 35, is charged with killing her four girls, who ranged in age from 5 to 17. Their bodies were found Jan. 9, 2008 — seven months after they were killed — when U.S. marshals entered her Southeast D.C. home to evict Jacks.

Earlier Wednesday, Judge Frederick H. Weisberg ruled that he would admit eight hours of Jacks’ statements to police the day she was taken into custody and charged with killing her daughters.

“It is clear to me from watching some eight hours of video that Ms. Jacks’ statements were entirely voluntary and not a product of police coercion,” Weisberg said in D.C. Superior Court.

She was immediately taken into custody and was formally charged about 12 hours later after questioning.

Jacks’ attorney argued that she was taken into custody without probable cause.

“[The marshals] had absolutely nothing on her” when they arrested her on the scene, said Peter Krauthamer, one of Jacks’ attorneys. “There were no kids screaming out in pain, no kids banging on the walls,” he said. And for all they knew, he said, the girls could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

“The government is trying to shoehorn probable cause into a situation in which there was no probable cause,” he said.

But Weisberg recounted the details of the scene marshals found at Jacks’ house — from the decaying, mummified bodies of her four girls to the awful stench that met them at the door, and concluded that “any police officer confronting that scene would be reasonable concluding [there was a crime committed] and Ms. Jacks was highly likely, or probably, the person who committed it.”

The defense’s second argument for suppressing the tapes was that Jacks was too ill to answer questions and knowingly waive her Miranda rights.

But Weisberg disagreed on both counts. “No one could watch this tape and not recognize Ms. Jacks is a highly intelligent individual … articulate … and educated,” Weisberg said. “She just had a very strong religious interpretation” of her daughters’ death, but that does not indicate a mental illness, he said.

Although she was subjected to hours of questioning, Weisberg said, “the detectives treated her respectfully, somewhat sympathetically.”

In response, Krauthamer requested a continuance — for the second time — until DNA evidence could be processed from the crime scene. The judge denied the motion for the second time.

Said defense attorney Lloyd Nolan: “We don’t know any more today about how those children died” than when the bodies were discovered.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.