Jacques is accused of setting fire to the predominantly black congregation's new chapel following President Barack Obama's election.
Michael F. Jacques
Updates a story posted Monday at 12:03 p.m.
SPRINGFIELD – On the first day of his civil rights arson trial, Michael F. Jacques was confronted by his own voice Monday as prosecutors played his secretly taped explanation of why the Macedonia Church of God in Christ burned so fast on Nov. 5, 2008.
“Gas, straight-up gas. Hit the corners and the whole thing went straight up,” Jacques said on a videotape played during opening arguments of his trial in U.S. District Court.
With two white co-defendants, Benjamin F. Haskell and Thomas A. Gleason, already pleading guilty, Jacques, 26, of Springfield is the only one standing trial for the high-profile church arson carried out several hours after Barack Obama’s election as president. If convicted, Jacques faces a minimum 10-year prison sentence for burning down the predominately black congregation’s new home.
Wearing a dark suit, with close-cropped hair, Jacques appeared focused and composed during the four-hour session. The trial is expected to last six weeks.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul H. Smyth told the jury that Jacques was arrested in a sting orchestrated by state and federal authorities in the days after the Tinkham Road church burst into flames early on Nov. 5, 2008.
After bragging about his prowess as an arsonist to an undercover state trooper, Jacques was brought in for questioning and eventually admitted in a taped confession that he, Haskell and Gleason had torched the church near their home. “All of us burnt it down,” Jacques told state trooper Michael S. Mazza near the end of a 6½-hour interrogation introduced by prosecutors Monday. “Poured the gasoline and lit in on fire.”
Smyth said prosecutors will present evidence that Jacques routinely used racist slurs and disparaged black people. He trained a Rottweiler to attack when hearing a slur for black people, and twisted Obama’s campaign slogan of “Change” into an race-baiting acronym.
Rejecting defense arguments that Jacques was coerced into a false confession, Smyth said the defendant “confessed because he realized he couldn’t talk his way out of something he had done.”
But defense lawyer Lori H. Levinson cautioned jurors about jumping to conclusions in a case with conflicting witness statements and no physical evidence against her client.
The challenge will be separating fact and evidence from some “really terrible things” they will hear about her client’s behavior and attitudes, according to Levinson, who said withdrawal symptoms from the narcotic painkiller Percocet also helped explain his false confession.
But the only evidence against her client, Levinson said, were words – the ones extracted from Jacques during a coerced confession, and the ones from witnesses responding to threats or manipulation by investigators.
After hearing both sides, the jurors will arrive at the only sensible conclusion, Levinson said. “You will find you have many reasonable doubts, and you will find that Michael Jacques is not guilty,” she said.
The first witness was the church’s pastor, Bryant Robinson Jr., of Springfield, whose father founded the congregation four decades ago.
After recounting the struggle to find a permanent location on King Street in the 1980s, Robinson described the decision to build a $2.5 million chapel on Tinkham Road and the fund-raising campaign that made it possible.
On the night of Obama’s election, Robinson said he was watching the victory celebration on television when his brother, Andrew, called: “He said: They are burning our church to the ground,” Robinson said.