A New Castle County jury has acquitted a man of first-degree murder charges in the 2018 killing of a 25-year-old man in Wilmington.
After less than a week of trial testimony, a jury last week found Charles Jones not guilty of murdering Blayton Palmer.
Police were alerted one morning in October 2018 and found Palmer with a gunshot wound at the 2300 block of N. Market St. He died a the hospital, police said after the shooting.
Jones, 25, was indicted last year in the cold-case shooting. Court documents did not disclose a motive in the shooting, and prosecutors in the Delaware Department of Justice declined to comment.
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Jones was acquitted of both murder and a firearms charge at trial.
“The jury took longer to deliberate in coming to their conclusion than it took to present all of the evidence in the trial,” Assistant Public Defender Ralph Wilkinson, Jones’ attorney, said in a written statement. “This shows they took great care in arriving at their decision.”