After deliberating for just over four hours, the federal jury in the case of U.S. v. Alan D. Talley had reached a verdict. Talley, a three-time narcotics offender who faced a mandatory 15-year prison term if jurors found him guilty of illegally possessing a firearm, prepared for the worst.
The prosecution's case against him rested largely on the eyewitness accounts of two Detroit police officers. Nicholas Dedeluk and Brandon Shortridge testified that they had seen Talley hurling a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver behind an abandoned house as their squad car rolled up on the scene of a loud outdoor party.
Talley's lawyer, Sanford Plotkin, was convinced of his client's innocence, and he had spent much of the four-day trial hammering at the weaknesses in the government's case: the dearth of physical evidence linking Talley to the gun, the dashboard camera that failed to capture either the defendant discarding a weapon or the police recovering one.
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