Jurors found Karl Pugh innocent of murder Friday after two days of deliberations, freeing him of all charges in connection with the shooting death of 27-year-old Quentin Joavor Ragland.
Police found Ragland lying in the hallway outside his apartment suffering from a single gunshot wound to his eye on Sept. 20, 2011.
Ragland’s mother, Judy Ragland, wept outside the courtroom following the verdict.
“I know there’s a God, but I get no justice,” Judy Ragland said. “This man is free to walk when he know he killed my son.”
This was Pugh’s second trial. A previous jury deadlocked in February.
A week before the first trial, Judge Ronna Beck granted a motion to suppress statements Pugh made to police confessing to the murder, after Pugh’s attorney argued that Pugh was high on PCP and that statements made by detectives during the interrogation misled Pugh into thinking that police were there to help him.
Ragland said she thought the jury would have found Pugh guilty if his statement to police had been admitted.
At the first trial, a witness testified that she, Pugh and Ragland had smoked PCP minutes before Ragland was killed. The witness said that she never saw the shooting.
Pugh’s fiancé, Denise Carpenter, was in the courtroom Friday for the reading of the verdict; she attended the entirety of both trials. Carpenter said that there was no way that Pugh committed the murder.
“That’s not the type of person he is,” Carpenter said. “Quentin was his best friend.”
