When Jolonta Little and Monte Johnson went on trial in 2019, charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of Deeniquia “Dee Dee” Dodds during a street robbery in the District, the U.S. attorney’s office faced a tough challenge. In the absence of conclusive physical evidence, the prosecution’s case would hinge mainly on the testimony of two admitted participants in the holdup, both of whom had made deals with the government to cooperate.
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In the end, a mistrial was declared, with deadlocked jurors unable to reach unanimous verdicts either acquitting or convicting the defendants in the July 4, 2016, shooting. As months passed and a planned second trial was postponed again and again, the killing of Dodds, a 24-year-old transgender woman who fought back against her attackers and lay bleeding on the sidewalk as they fled, remained unpunished.
On Friday, that changed in D.C. Superior Court. After pleading guilty to reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter in deals with prosecutors, Johnson and Little, who would have faced life behind bars if convicted of first-degree murder, were instead sentenced to eight years apiece. With credit for time served, dating to their arrests in 2016 and 2017, Johnson, 26, has only four years left in his term, while Little, 31, will be scheduled for release in three years.
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The pleas and sentences were “not only a miscarriage of justice, but a message of penalization for victims who attempt to protect themselves during a violent assault,” the head of the Anti-Violence Project at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community said in a statement sent to The Washington Post Friday.
As part of the bargain, prosecutors and defense lawyers were united in recommending that Judge Milton C. Lee Jr. limit the men's’ sentences to eight years, even though voluntary manslaughter in the District carries up to 30 years. From the bench Friday, Lee asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Donovan why she thought eight years was acceptable punishment in the case.
She replied, in effect, that the government was unwilling to risk a second trial and possible acquittals. The deal “takes into consideration the first trial and the evidentiary difficulties that were highlighted,” Donovan said.
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“It’s an appropriate sentence,” she told the judge.
The other two defendants, brothers Shareem Hall, 28, and Cyheme Hall, 26, each pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified for the prosecution at the 2019 trial. In return, first-degree murder charges were dismissed in their cases. Second-degree murder in the District carries up to a life term, but with no mandatory minimum. It would be unusual for the brothers, scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 20, to get more prison time than the men they bore witness against in court.
“For those who have looked at the case from the outside and suggested that somehow this is a sentence that doesn’t really reflect the seriousness of the case, I think the government has tried to explain that,” said Lee, who presided at the short-circuited murder trial. “There are limitations to the evidence that folks who don’t look critically at what happened surely do not understand.”
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Police alleged that Johnson, Little and the Hall brothers, three of them with guns, were cruising parts of Northeast and Northwest Washington in a Pontiac in the predawn hours of the Fourth of July 2016, looking for people to steal money from. In all, they allegedly robbed seven victims. When Dodds was accosted, police said, she put up a struggle, grabbing the barrel of one of the pistols, and died as a result.
Prosecutors initially said they would seek hate crime sentencing-enhancements, alleging that the men had deliberately targeted transgender women, but the hate-crime allegations eventually were dropped for lack of evidence.
At the trial, the Hall brothers implicated themselves, Johnson and Little in the robberies, and Cyheme Hall testified that Johnson shot Dodds. He said one of the men grabbed her silver clutch purse after she collapsed to the pavement, then they hurried back as the Pontiac and sped away.
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“There was nothing in the purse,” he told the jurors.
Defense attorneys labeled the brothers liars, arguing that the two had coordinated their stories while locked in the same cell at the D.C. jail and made deals with the government to avoid decades in prison. Prosecutors had no DNA evidence, no murder weapon, no unassailable independent eyewitnesses. On March 6, 2019, the jurors found Johnson and Little each not guilty of a dozen firearms-related charges but said they were hopelessly deadlocked on the first-degree murder counts.
The LGBT center sent a letter to Judge Lee, decrying the plea bargains and sentences, and prosecutor Donovan on Friday delivered a message from the aunt who had raised Dodds, whom Dodds called “Mama.”
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“She wanted us to convey to the court that she believes these men took someone special from the world, someone very dear to her,” Donovan said. But “she cannot hold hate in her heart,” and hopes that “these young men … realize their actions were wrong. She hopes they learn that actions have consequences.”
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As for Little, he told Lee: “Mistakes could be a lesson learned, if you let it be. And I’ve been through a lot of mistakes in my life, so that becomes a lot of lessons that I learned. I’m 31 years old and I’ve been incarcerated all my [adult] life.” He said, “I got to change my people, places and things.”
Johnson was succinct, saying: “Thank you for accepting the plea. I want to send my condolences to the family and everything. I’m sorry for their loss.”
Looking at him from the bench, Lee asked, “What are you going to do with yourself when you come back to the community” in four years?
“I’m going to work,” Johnson said. “I’m looking at doing real estate.”