Road rage killer fails to overturn conviction for murdering Minnesota dad in front of teenage son by claiming jury wasn’t black enough

A driver who fatally shot a youth baseball coach during a road rage incident on a highway has had his appeal dismissed because he said the jury was too white.

Jamal Lindsey Smith, 36, was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 for first-degree murder after killing Jay Boughton with a single bullet in Plymouth, Minnesota, on July 6, 2021.

He was arrested after a two-month investigation when detectives found a Facebook video he had posted on Facebook showing him with a gun in a car matching the suspect’s vehicle.

Smith’s defense argued during the trial that he could not have shot Boughton in the head and neck while he was driving, and suggested it was a passenger who had fired.

In his appeal, he continued to maintain that prosecutors had “failed to provide sufficient evidence to prove he fired the shot that killed Boughton.”

But he also claimed there were not enough black people on the jury and the judge dismissed his objections to the lack of diversity.

The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected all of his appeals and upheld the life sentence he is serving far from his hometown of Chicago.

“Because Smith has failed to meet his burden of proof on each of the new trial claims and because the only reasonable inference supported by the proven circumstances — when viewed as a whole — is that Smith fired the fatal shot, we affirm the verdict of guilty,” the court wrote in its opinion.

However, the justices noted that the lack of diversity on juries was a legitimate concern and asked the Minnesota Legislature to increase juror pay from $20 to $100 per day.

“It is essential to the fairness of trials and to the public’s confidence in our justice system that people of color serve on juries,” they wrote.

The court noted that if the problem is not recognized and addressed, “that failure will at some point lead to systematic exclusion.”

Boughton, a coach with the Armstrong Cooper Youth Baseball Association, was driving home from a game on U.S. 169 with his son Harrison, 16.

Harrison testified that Harris’s rented Chevy Suburban “was traveling fast and got so close that we had to swerve.”

He said his father honked his horn and gave the driver the middle finger. Seconds later, he heard glass breaking and saw a hole in the window.

Boughton’s car, with him slumped behind the wheel, crashed through a fence in an apartment complex parking lot. Harrison called 911 and performed CPR on him.

Police found the abandoned Suburban and video footage of the cars driving side by side on the highway. It took weeks for police to identify the driver.

They eventually found the driver of the suspect SUV on a gas station camera and identified him as Smith.

They then tracked him down on social media and found a video of him showing money and a gun in what appears to be the same car, with two passengers.

The Springfield Armory XD model, .45 caliber semiautomatic rifle that Smith brandished matched the bullet that killed Boughton.

Smith was arrested on August 31, 2021, in Decatur, Illinois, and charged with, among other things, first-degree murder.

“This was really a needle in a haystack,” Plymouth Police Chief Erik Fadden said at the time, noting that it took 1,500 hours of work to solve the case.

“Our detectives never stopped digging and working and knocking on doors and watching video after video after video. And then every once in a while you get that little break.”

Smith’s last message was: ‘Sometimes it’s your friends who keep your enemies informed about you… Be careful.’

After Smith was found guilty on all charges, a juror told reporters that the jury had no doubts that he shot, but that they still had to consider whether he intended to kill.

“The suspect was driving at a speed of 95 to 110 km/h on the highway, in the dark and during a rain shower,” police said at the time.

“In order to shoot the victim, he had to be driving his vehicle. He had to reach over his passenger. Somehow, the window rolled down and he shot the victim. I mean, that takes a lot.

“It wasn’t just a fluke. Things he did leading up to the shooting indicated to us that he was planning on doing this.”

Smith’s fate was sealed when jurors were shown a video of Smith and his friends happily going to a bar and drinking heavily hours after the shooting.

“A juror saw that video again and was shocked [their vote]“If it was an accidental shooting, how could he be celebrating?” the juror said.