Mistrial: The Jury Deciding Who Killed Karter Could Not Agree on Any Count

Karter Ambrose was two years old. Over one weekend in November 2020 he was beaten to death, and for four days the State of Georgia stood in front of a jury and tried to prove the person who did it was his mother, Kianna Davis. After long deliberations, the jury came back with the one thing nobody plans for. They could not agree. Not on a single one of the seven counts. Judge Katherine Lumsden declared a mistrial and discharged the jury. No verdict.

WATCH • PART 19 Judge Lumsden declares a full mistrial and discharges the jury

Let me be plain about what that is, because a mistrial gets misread the second it hits the internet. A full mistrial means the trial ended with no result. Every one of the seven counts is unresolved. It is not a conviction. It is not an acquittal. Nobody won and nobody lost. Kianna Davis walks out of that courtroom exactly as she walked in, presumed innocent, because twelve people never said otherwise. A hung jury settles nothing about guilt or innocence. Anyone selling you this outcome as a victory for one side or a defeat for the other is selling you something the record does not contain.

The seven counts were malice murder, two counts of felony murder, first-degree cruelty to children, aggravated assault, a second-degree murder count built on the failure to seek medical care, and second-degree cruelty to children. Georgia does not take a majority on a felony verdict. It takes all twelve, on every count, or it takes none. This jury reported it could not get to twelve on any of them, and it told the court the same deadlock would hold even if they came back after the weekend. The defense moved for a mistrial. The State agreed it saw nowhere meaningful left to go. The judge made the call and let the jury go home.

WATCH • PART 16 The jury reports it is deadlocked on all seven counts

The numbers on each count exist. Which way any of them leans is sealed, by the court, on the record, and I am going to hold that same line here. When the jury first reported it was stuck, the judge took the split without which side each number favored, then cited Smith v. State, which points back to the older Sears, and ruled it improper to reveal the direction. That is the process protecting itself. The moment a split with a direction attached gets out, the holdouts become targets and strangers start doing math on a decision that never finished. So you will not decode which way anything leaned from me. There is nothing to decode. A hung jury has no direction. That is what hung means.

Now sit with why a case like this produces exactly the kind of split a jury hangs on. From the first gavel this trial turned on one tension. Two adults were in the home with Karter across the window when he was fatally injured. His mother, and a second adult, Kiyon Benton, who is charged in the same death and who is being tried separately on his own. The State did not indict Davis until October 2023, almost three years after Karter died, which tells you this was never a case where police walked in and solved it on the spot. They built it, slowly, and the defense spent the whole trial showing the jury the seams. Two adults in the home, a three-year delay, and reasonable doubt living in the gap between them. That is fertile ground for twelve people to divide, and divide is what they did.

Before it gave up, this jury did something that tells you it took the work seriously. It asked to see the evidence again. The apartment body camera from the scene. Then Kianna Davis's own first interview with police, her account of that weekend. I am not going to read anything into that, and neither should you. A jury going back to the primary evidence is a jury doing the job right. But notice where they went. They went straight to the hinge the entire case swings on. Can the State prove it was her.

This is the moment the trial actually changed shape, so let me name it. Four days of testimony proved that a two-year-old was beaten to death and that his death was a homicide. The medical examiners said so. What those four days did not do is convince twelve people, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the hand responsible was Kianna Davis's. That was the whole question the trial existed to answer, and it ended without answering it. Deliberation did not resolve into a verdict. It resolved into unresolved.

Which puts a new question on the table, and it is a real one. The State of Georgia now has to decide whether to try Kianna Davis a second time. The judge called this the oldest case on her docket. The earliest a retrial could even begin is November. No decision has been made. A retrial means empaneling a new jury, putting the medical examiners and the investigators back on the stand, and asking a fresh twelve to do what this twelve could not. It also means the money, the time, and the weight of running the entire thing again, against the same two-adults problem and the same delay the first jury could not get past. That decision belongs to the State, and it has not made it yet.

One thing I will not let disappear under the procedure. There is a real two-year-old at the center of all of this, and he is gone. More than five years after Karter Ambrose died, no one has been held responsible for his death in a court of law, and the person the State accused is still, in the eyes of that same law, presumed innocent. Both of those things are true in one breath. A child is dead and the case is unresolved. The system is built to carry both at once, and right now it is carrying them with a resolution on neither side.

WATCH • NO BREAKS EDITION The full trial day, gavel to mistrial, uncut

I have been on this one from the first gavel. If you want to see how a case this heavy ended with no verdict, the deadlock note, the sealed direction, the mistrial, and the whole day gavel to gavel, the entire trail runs through the coverage. Start with the complete Who Killed Karter coverage and watch how it landed.