The Jury Has the Case: Deliberations Begin This Morning in the Yella Beezy Capital Murder Trial — Six Years to the Day After MO3 Was Killed
After three weeks of testimony and Tuesday's closing arguments, a Dallas County jury begins deliberating this morning in the capital murder trial of Markies Conway, known as Yella Beezy — on November 11, exactly six years after MO3 was shot on Interstate 35E in Dallas. No verdict has been reported, and none is expected to be hurried.
DALLAS — The trial's speaking parts are finished. Closing arguments were heard on Tuesday in the capital murder case against Markies Conway, the Dallas rapper known as Yella Beezy, and jurors are scheduled to begin deliberations this morning, FOX 4 and NBC DFW reported. Conway has pleaded not guilty to capital murder in the 2020 killing of fellow Dallas rapper MO3, born Melvin Noble Jr.; prosecutors argue he helped orchestrate the killing, and the defense has challenged the evidence and disputed the alleged motive.
The date is the detail the courtroom cannot escape. MO3 was killed on Interstate 35E in Dallas on November 11, 2020 — six years ago today. The trial that grew out of that afternoon has run three weeks in Judge Chika Anyiam's courtroom: the state rested on Monday, November 9, after further testimony from lead Dallas police detective Eric Barnes; the judge denied the defense's motion to dismiss for lack of evidence; and the defense called its own witnesses before both sides rested and argued the case on Tuesday, as this station's closings file reported.
What the jury weighs is the state's payment theory against the defense's challenge to it. Prosecutors allege Conway paid Kewon White to kill MO3; White was convicted of capital murder in his own trial in September and sentenced to life without parole. The defense pressed the lead detective on what investigators could prove about a $40,000 cash withdrawal and on witness accounts, and a childhood friend who had told a grand jury that Conway wanted MO3 dead recanted that account on the stand, telling jurors he had made it up — testimony the judge allowed the jury to use in weighing his truthfulness, not as proof of a plot.
A capital murder conviction could mean life in prison. Deliberations in a three-week case rarely move at the speed of the news cycle, and no verdict had been reported in any source read at this morning's file. When the jury speaks — today, this week, or later — this desk will file the verdict, and only the verdict, as its own story.
