The Murder Case Against the Guy Charged With Killing the Leader of a Detroit Synagogue Was Thrown Out
DETROIT—On Friday, the case against a man accused of killing a Detroit synagogue leader fell apart when the judge dropped the last murder charge against him. This happened three weeks after a jury found him not guilty of a similar but different charge.
Judge Margaret Van Houten said that putting Michael Jackson-Bolanos on trial for murder again would be “double jeopardy,” which is against the law.
It is a win for Jackson-Bolanos, who has said many times that he is not guilty of stabbing Samantha Woll to death. The prosecutors agreed that the murder charge probably needed to be dropped, but it was still a setback in the case that got a lot of attention.
Woll, 40, was discovered dead outside of her Detroit home in October of last year. People thought the attack might have been an act of antisemitic revenge during the war between Israel and Hamas, but cops found no link.
In July, Jackson-Bolanos was found not guilty of first-degree planned murder by a jury. But they couldn’t agree on a different charge of criminal murder, which in Michigan means murder that happened while someone else was committing another crime. In this case, the police said there was a home attack.
Based on a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling about partial jury verdicts, the judge said there would not be a second trial on Friday.
Van Houten said it was a “bad choice,” but she had to use it on Jackson-Bolanos. She dropped the murder and home invasion claims that were still out there. The prosecutors promised to appeal.
Jackson-Bolanos was then given an 18-month prison sentence for lying to police during the probe. This was Jackson-Bolanos’s only conviction at trial. Brian Brown, a defense lawyer, asked for probation.
The judge told Jackson-Bolanos, “If lying were an Olympic sport, you would win a gold medal.”
Woll was found dead outside, just east of downtown Detroit, several hours after she got back from a wedding in the fall. She got out of her house before she passed out in the middle of the night, according to investigators.
Jackson-Bolanos testified in his defense. He said he had nothing to do with what happened, but he did say that he touched Woll’s body when he found it in the neighborhood. His coat had blood spots on it.
“I, a black man, broke into a car in the middle of the night and found a dead white woman in front of me.” Jackson-Bolanos said, “That doesn’t look good at all” when asked why he didn’t call the cops.
He said he was just somewhere else at the wrong time.
First, police caught Woll’s ex-boyfriend, who called 911 in a panic and said he thought he might have killed her but couldn’t remember. He said that those claims were caused by a bad response to medicine and was not charged.
Woll was president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue and worked for U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin and the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, as a Democrat.
Woll was a “beacon in her community,” according to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.