A jury today found a local meat market manager not guilty in the fatal shooting of a Japanese exchange student, ending a case that exposed major differences between the attitudes of Japanese and Americans toward guns.
The 12-member jury took just over three hours to acquit the defendant, Rodney Peairs, 31, of manslaughter in the killing of 16-year-old Yoshihiro Hattori last October.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Peairs said he would no longer use guns, The Associated Press reported. And in remarks intended for the teen-ager's father, he said, "I'm very sorry that any of this ever happened."
Mr. Hattori was looking for a Halloween party in the Baton Rouge suburb of Central on Oct. 17 when he and a companion mistakenly rang Mr. Peairs's doorbell, frightening his wife. The case became the focus of intense interest in Japan because it seemed to confirm the Japanese view of America as a place rife with guns. News of the verdict led newscasts in Japan on Monday.
"You have the absolute legal right in this country to answer your door with a gun," Mr. Peairs's lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, said today in his closing argument. "In your house, if you want to do it, you have the legal right to answer everybody that comes to your door with a gun."
Masanori Suzuki, the executive director of the exchange program that sent Mr. Hattori to Louisiana, told The A.P. he was outraged by Mr. Unglesby's depiction of Mr. Peairs as a victim of events. "He didn't kill an animal, he killed a person," Mr. Suzuki said. "The gun he shot him with was not a gun for self-defense."
Mr. Hattori's father, Masaichi, an engineer from Nagoya, in central Japan, who had attended all seven days of the trial, missed the verdict when he went for a walk. But afterward, on the steps of the courthouse, he told reporters through a translator, "The verdict is incredible, unbelievable."
The translator added: "He doesn't know which home is safe, that every home someone could shoot at him. He doesn't want to go home with a bad impression, but as a result of everything, he can't help but go home with a bad impression."
Before he came to Louisiana for the trial, Mr. Hattori, along with his wife, Mieko, led a petition drive calling for the elimination of handguns in American homes. They collected 1.6 million signatures, some of which they presented to the United States Ambassador in December.
Mr. Hattori said he would be willing to meet with Mr. Peairs to discuss his campaign for tighter control of weapons in the United States. Court Packed Every Day
Throughout the trial, the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney, Doug Moreau, was careful not to turn the case into an argument for gun control, and there was evidence that many in this city of about 220,000 people believed Mr. Peairs (pronounced PEERS) had acted reasonably.
"A man's home is his castle," one potential juror said early last week, expressing puzzlement about why the case had even come to trial. "That's my question -- why?" She was struck from the jury pool.
The courtroom was packed every day, and Mr. Peairs had sympathizers both inside and outside the courthouse. "We're just prisoners in our neighborhoods," Charles Sutton, a parking lot owner, said as he stood near the courthouse. "It would be to me what a normal person would do under those circumstances."
The focus of Mr. Unglesby's defense was that Mr. Peairs had acted reasonably as a frightened homeowner in shooting Mr. Hattori when the young man rushed toward him that night while trying to find the party. "We have two people colliding from completely different perspectives," Mr. Unglesby said, "one who sees an intruder who is a danger to his family, who sees a person with a grin or smile on his face coming to his house with absolutely no respect for his home, his gun, or his warning."
Mr. Moreau based his prosecution on the apparent thoughtlessness behind the shooting.
Describing Mr. Peairs's actions in his closing argument today, Mr. Moreau said: "He goes back to the bedroom, gets the gun, never, ever, ever asking, 'Hey, what's up? What's out there? What would you like me to do?' It's his conduct in going to the closet and getting the biggest handgun made by human beings and never ever asking what it's for."
The fatal shooting puzzled people in Japan, where owning a gun is banned with a few limited exceptions, as much as it shocked them. Masaichi Hattori said he was even more baffled after hearing Mr. Peairs testify in his own defense on Saturday. "After today, I'm even more unsure about why," Mr. Hattori said through a translator.
Three days of testimony made it clear that the teen-ager had been killed almost by reflex. Little more than a minute passed between the time Mr. Hattori rang the Peairses' doorbell and the time Mr. Peairs shot him.
During those moments, the suburban household was in turmoil and terror, according to testimony. Without exchanging any words with his wife, Mr. Peairs responded to her frightened demand that he get his gun. He pulled a loaded .44-caliber Magnum revolver from his suitcase, went to the door of his carport, opened it, and fired at Mr. Hattori after the boy failed to heed his warning to "freeze."
"There was no thinking involved," Mr. Peairs's wife, Bonnie, said on Saturday during an hour of testimony in which she broke down in tears several times. "I wish I could have thought. If I could have just thought."
Her fear precipitated the shooting, both sides agreed, and in some respects, it was the most puzzling aspect of the case. Neither her testimony nor her husband's fully explained her fear.
Another mystery was why Mrs. Peairs shouted to a neighbor to "go away" when the neighbor called for help as Mr. Hattori lay dying in the carport. Neither Mr. Peairs nor his wife came out of the locked-up house until sheriff's deputies came, about 40 minutes after the shooting.
On the evening of the shooting, Mr. Peairs returned home from his job at the Winn-Dixie supermarket. As the Peairses and their three children sat down to dinner, the doorbell rang.
Mrs. Peairs went to the door of the carport to see who was there. She opened the door and saw Webb Haymaker, the 16-year-old with whose family Mr. Hattori was staying, standing a few yards away. 'Looking for the Party'
Mr. Haymaker testified that he said, "We're looking for the party."
Just then, Mrs. Peairs spotted Mr. Hattori coming around a corner. "He was coming real fast towards me," she testified. "I had never had somebody come at me like that before. I was terrified."
The young man spoke little English. Partly out of frustration, partly out of a desire to communicate instantly, testimony indicated, he often rushed up to people, waving his arms, which is what he did that night.
When Mrs. Peairs called her husband to get his gun, Mr. Peairs said he did not ask any questions. Rushing to a back room, he retrieved his revolver.
Running to the carport door, he spotted someone coming from behind one of his parked cars "real fast," he testified. He said he pointed the gun and yelled "freeze" to the two teen-agers, but he said Mr. Hattori kept coming. Mr. Peairs testified that he saw Mr. Hattori holding something in one of his outstretched arms -- a camera, it was later learned.
Mr. Hattori may not have noticed the gun because he had lost a contact lens earlier, his father said.
"I wanted him to stop," Mr. Peairs testified. "He didn't. He kept coming. The next thing I remember, I was scared to death. This person was not going to stop. This person was going to do harm to me." With the young man less than five feet away, he fired one shot into his chest.
"I felt I had no choice," Mr. Peairs said. "I couldn't understand why this person wouldn't stop."
Mr. Peairs himself seemed almost baffled by what he had done. His testimony was delivered in a flat, toneless drawl, and he wept quietly several times on the witness stand.
He expressed remorse. When asked by his lawyer whether "anything good" could come out of the affair, Mr. Peairs responded, "That Mr. Hattori can understand how I feel."
