An ‘absolute massacre’ or self-defense? Closing arguments in Maurice Hill trial paint two portraits of Tioga police standoff.
Jurors are expected to begin deliberations Thursday.
With their final pitch to jurors Wednesday, attorneys in Maurice Hill’s trial for attempted homicide and other offenses related to the 2019 shooting of six Philadelphia police officers presented one of the department’s darkest day in markedly different views.
As criminal defense attorney Ellis Palividas told it, Hill had fired through his kitchen wall in self-defense that afternoon, believing the officers who had entered the rowhouse on North 15th Street in Tioga to search for drugs were not law enforcement officials, but intruders who sought to hurt him.
“Mr. Hill was defending himself against what he thought at the time were home invaders,” Palividas told jurors. “That is why he acted the way that he acted.”
Prosecutors vehemently rebuffed that argument.
They say Hill fired more than 130 rounds during the 7½-hour barricade, wielding an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle as well as smaller firearms as he fired upon officers both inside and outside of the home, striking one in the head, others in the arms or legs.
“That man right there, he tried to assassinate the law,” said Assistant District Attorney Anthony Voci, the lead prosecutor in the case, as he gestured to Hill. “Not just law enforcement, but the law.”
The back-and-forth marked the closing of a trial that featured tearful testimony from around half a dozen police officers who responded that day, describing gushing bullet wounds in vivid detail and a frantic escape from the property as whizzing bullets exploded the drywall around them.
» READ MORE: Philadelphia police emotionally recall a Tioga standoff that left six shot in one of the department’s darkest days
Palividas, in turn, suggested that police had not announced themselves inside the home, as well as in the moments before they broke in the door, using a battering ram to secure the property with the intent to obtain a search warrant. The attorney made a point to mention that while prosecutors had used a series of Ring doorbell videos to show moments from the standoff, that moment was not shown in court.
The bold entrance ultimately triggered a “fight-or-flight” response in Hill, said Palividas, who told the jury that Hill had just arrived home from the hospital where his daughter had recently been born. Hill himself testified Tuesday that after seeing a shadow of a gun in the next room, he had grabbed the assault weapon from behind his bedroom door and fired.
» READ MORE: Man accused of shooting 6 Philly police officers in Tioga standoff testifies at trial: ‘I panicked’
Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Diana L. Anhault is expected to deliver instructions to the jury Thursday morning before leaving the group to deliberate whether Hill is guilty of the dozens of charges filed against him. Should they convict him of the worst of those offenses, he faces decades in prison.
Voci rounded out his frequently animated arguments by again wielding Hill’s assault weapon high over his head.
He drew attention to the serial number which had been “obliterated” from the side of the weapon — a common tactic to conceal an unlawful firearm’s origin — as well as Hill’s guilty plea to a firearms charge in 2001 that Voci said barred him from carrying a weapon.
Perhaps anticipating that the jury would take into account that the drugs police found in Hill’s apartment were bags of marijuana — a drug legal in nearly half of the nation’s states — Voci reminded them of the scales, heat-sealed bags, large-capacity ammunition magazines, and the five firearms police also recovered from the property.
He described the house as the center of a “drug organization.”
“There’s more violence around drugs than there is around anything else,” Voci said. “... guns and drugs go together like peanut butter and jelly.”
When he was not focused on Hill, Voci directed attention to the row of injured police officers who sat side-by-side in the front of the courtroom, urging the jury to remember their testimonies.
“Heroes, each and every last one of them,” Voci said, specifically mentioning Shaun Parker, the officer struck in the head. “By the grace of only God is he in this front row and here to tell you about it.”