Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
New trial ordered for driver serving 30 years for 2013 crash that killed 5
WEST PALM BEACH – A driver who is serving 30 years in prison for killing five young friends in a horrific 2013 crash is entitled to a new trial, the 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach ruled in a split decision on Wednesday.
Jabari Kemp, now 27, had testified at trial that he blacked out while exiting Interstate 95 at Blue Heron Boulevard in Riviera Beach and caused the horrific crash.
The impact of the highspeed collision was so powerful that four of the five occupants of the Lexus that Kemp crashed into were ejected. They died from traumatic injuries, including crushed internal organs, broken bones and severed limbs, authorities said.
Killed on April 13, 2013, were the Lexus driver, Jason Mahlung, 21; and passengers Makita Campbell, 14; Shonteria Grimsley and Christina Oliver-Joseph, both 17; and Orane Cummings, 22. The victims were friends from Riviera Beach.
“The gravity of our ruling does not escape us,” Judge Cory Ciklin wrote in the 2-1 decision, as a nod to the grieving and traumatized families of the young victims.
The deadly crash was an “unimaginable nightmare,” Ciklin wrote in a concurring opinion.
Kemp’s 2015 vehicular-manslaughter conviction and his 30-year sentence must be tossed, he wrote, because of a Florida Highway Patrol trooper’s critical but problematic testimony as an expert witness at trial.
Criteria that an expert witness must meet under Florida law has been flip flopping since 2013 when lawmakers approved new stricter standards.
Four years later in 2017, the Supreme Court blocked the move to the new standards. And then, in May, after a shift in the makeup of the state’s high court, the old standard was reinstated.
Wednesday’s majority opinion concluded that the trooper’s testimony did not meet the requirements of the most current standard.
The trooper’s testimony undermined Kemp’s.
Kemp, of Florida City, told jurors that he fainted behind the wheel and wasn’t in control of his sporty Mercedes when he exited the interstate.
To convict under Florida state law, jurors had to believe that Kemp was in control of his car at the time of the crash.
Prosecutors argued Kemp, then 21, drove recklessly at 128 mph and ran a red light at the bottom of the off ramp, and was awake when his car slammed into the eastbound Lexus.
The trooper, Corporal Robert Dooley, an accident investigator who had experience reconstructing hundreds of crashes, testified that there was evidence that Kemp had been braking at the time of impact and therefore couldn’t have been unconscious.
Dooley’s testimony was inadmissible because it could not be proved that it “was based upon legally sufficient facts or data that met the reliability and admissibility requirements” of the expert-witness standard, Ciklin wrote.
“With the trial record that is before us, we have no choice but to hold that the state did not meet its burden in Kemp’s first trial and that a new trial is warranted,” Ciklin said.
Judge Melanie May wrote the dissent.
“Dooley’s testimony was based on physics and momentum, which is scientifically reliable,” she wrote. “It was the jury’s role to decide what weight to give [Dooley’s testimony].”
In conclusion, the ruling majority reiterated its position.
“The expert’s braking opinion was not shown to be based upon sufficient facts or data, was not shown to be the product of reliable principles and methodology and amounted to little more than a subjective and unverifiable opinion,” Judge Carole Taylor wrote.