ROANOKE, Va. – A guilty verdict in a Roanoke murder trial.
After deliberating for more than five hours on Wednesday, a jury found Isaiah Baldwin guilty of second-degree murder for shooting and killing Steven Crowder at the 7-Eleven on Grandin Road back in 2023.
Baldwin was initially charged with first-degree murder.
The killing was all caught on camera. In the surveillance video, you can see the Crowder punch Baldwin and then start to walk away. That’s when Baldwin pulls out a gun and fires.
An autopsy reveals Crowder was shot six times.
With the crime caught on camera, you may wonder how Baldwin got a lesser charge.
“The jury would be just looking at all the circumstances,” said John Fishwick, the owner of Fishwick & Associates law firm and the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia.
He said in a jury trial, jurors have to decide if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A first-degree murder charge requires malice and planning.
“It could be just a few seconds. They could have concluded it was first-degree murder. There’s no set amount of time. But in order to find that it’s first-degree murder, the jury has to find that there was some planning, that there was some specific intent to kill that person,” said Fishwick.
The jury can also be given a “waterfall instruction,” which means if they don’t unanimously agree that a defendant is guilty of the higher charge, they move down to a less severe one.
“If there’s no finding of planning or pre-meditation, it sounds like the jury in the 7-Eleven case landed on second-degree murder,” said Fishwick.