History > 2008 > USA > Justice > States (I)
Border
Patrol Agent’s Trial
in Killing of Illegal Immigrant
Starts in Arizona
February
28, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
TUCSON — In
a patch of desert just north of Mexico, what began as a relatively routine
interception a year ago ended when a Border Patrol agent shot and killed an
illegal immigrant at close range.
Whether the agent’s action was murder or self-defense is being resolved at a
trial that began this week in the heated atmosphere over illegal immigration.
The agent, Nicholas W. Corbett, 40, was charged with second-degree murder,
manslaughter and negligent homicide for a shooting that prosecutors say was
unprovoked as the immigrant, Francisco Javiér Domínguez, 22, was surrendering.
The prosecutor, Grant Woods, a former state attorney general, said Wednesday at
the trial that Agent Corbett had lied to supervisors about what occurred.
Scientific evidence, Mr. Woods said, overwhelmingly supported the accounts of
Mr. Domínguez’s companions, all relatives.
“We all respect the Border Patrol and law enforcement, but you don’t kill
somebody who is trying to surrender,” he told the jury.
Agent Corbett’s lawyer, Sean Chapman, said the agent, who has been assigned to
administrative work, opened fire after Mr. Domínguez, angry and frustrated at
the prospect of being arrested, had threatened to “crush his skull” with a
stone.
The accounts by his companions are unreliable, Mr. Chapman said, because they
were “corrupted and influenced” by Mexican consular officials who met them
afterward. The Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, he added, “did a horrible
investigation.”
Tensions along the border are increasing. Human rights groups on both sides
accuse the Border Patrol of overly aggressive tactics. The agency says its
officers face increasing violence from smugglers frustrated at tightened
enforcement.
The Border Patrol would not comment on the trial, a rare criminal prosecution of
an agent for on-duty action. The only other agent in a recent murder trial was
acquitted in 1994, also in Arizona.
The agency recorded 987 assaults on agents in the last year, often with stones,
almost three times the 2002 number.
In the last two years, officials said, agents have killed 12 people and injured
116. A spokesman for the patrol, Ramon Rivera, said other data was not
available.
The patrol has said it tries to respond with nonlethal weapons when possible,
but even that has caused friction. This month, Mexico demanded that the patrol
stop firing tear gas into Tijuana neighborhoods to stop the throwing of stones
at agents.
The case of two other agents, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, continues to
linger. They were convicted two years ago in federal court in Texas of assault,
civil rights violations and other charges in the shooting of an unarmed drug
smuggler. That case has been a cause célèbre for conservative commentators. They
have argued in vain for a presidential pardon for the agents.
About a dozen supporters of Agent Corbett demonstrated on Tuesday at the
courthouse, carrying American flags and signs reading “Free Corbett” and
“Support the Border Patrol.”
Agent Corbett nodded and shook their hands as he walked in with his lawyers and
then gave a quick glance at a shrine that human rights groups had set up in Mr.
Domínguez’s honor.
The rights groups say this case is part and parcel for a patrol too quick to use
deadly force. “If Agent Corbett is not found guilty, it will send a message to
all members of the Border Patrol that they are free to do as they wish,
including murdering migrants,” said a spectator at the trial, Cecile Lumer of
Citizens for Border Solutions, a group in Bisbee.
Agent Corbett and Mr. Domínguez’s family members sat on opposite sides of the
courtroom. Mr. Domínguez’s mother, María, sobbed when Mr. Woods displayed a
photo of her son, who worked at a factory in New York.
The shooting was 100 yards from the border. Mr. Woods said Mr. Domínguez was
trying to take relatives to the New York region to work. After the Border Patrol
saw them and others in their group broke off, the Domínguez group tried to
return to Mexico. Agent Corbett drove up, circled them in his truck and exited
holding his gun, Mr. Woods said. He ordered group members to their knees and
struck Mr. Domínguez as he struggled, to make him comply. Mr. Domínguez, Mr.
Woods added, was shot from less than a foot away. The bullet entered under an
armpit, pierced the heart and lodged in the abdomen. Mr. Domínguez died at the
scene.
Mr. Chapman did not dispute that Mr. Domínguez had been shot at close range,
saying it was in self-defense because he was about to strike Agent Corbett with
a stone.
“Nicholas Corbett did not want to shoot this man,” Mr. Chapman said. “But if he
hadn’t done it, he might be dead today.”
Border Patrol Agent’s Trial in Killing of Illegal
Immigrant Starts in Arizona, NYT, 28.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28agent.html
Ohio
Jury Reaches Sentence for Ex - Cop
February
27, 2008
Filed at 2:01 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
CANTON,
Ohio (AP) -- A jury in Ohio has reached a decision on the sentence for a former
police officer convicted of killing his pregnant girlfriend and their unborn
daughter.
Bobby Cutts Jr. could face the death penalty, life in prison without parole or
life in prison with parole after a certain number of years.
The judge in the case has asked everyone to gather in the courtroom Wednesday
afternoon to hear the jury's recommendation.
Jurors have been deliberating since Tuesday morning.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's
earlier story is below.
CANTON, Ohio (AP) -- A jury returned for a second day Wednesday to weigh a
possible death sentence for a former police officer convicted of killing his
pregnant girlfriend and their unborn daughter.
Jurors deliberated most of Tuesday and went back to work Wednesday morning in
the case against 30-year-old Bobby Cutts Jr.
The same jury had convicted Cutts on Feb. 15 of aggravated murder in the death
of the nearly full-term fetus and of murder in the death of Jessie Davis, 26. He
could receive the death penalty, life in prison without parole or life with
parole eligibility after 20, 25 or 30 years.
In his trial testimony, Cutts tearfully contended that he had accidentally
killed Davis with an elbow blow to the throat during a disagreement at her
northeast Ohio home last June. He said in a panic, he dumped her body in a park.
He spoke to jurors again Monday during the trial's penalty phase, sobbing and
telling them he took responsibility for the deaths. It was an unsworn statement
that shielded him from cross-examination by prosecutors.
If the jury recommends the death penalty, the judge can still reduce the
sentence to life, but that has happened in Ohio just seven times in 27 years.
For more than a week after Davis disappeared last June, Cutts denied knowledge
of her whereabouts as thousands searched in the area.
The couple's son, Blake, now 3, gave investigators their first clues when he
said, ''Mommy's crying. Mommy broke the table. Mommy's in the rug,'' and later,
''Daddy's mad.''
Cutts finally led authorities to the body in a park miles from Davis' home,
wrapped in a comforter. He resigned as a Canton patrolman after his arrest.
Prosecutors contend Cutts killed Davis and the unborn baby to avoid making child
support payments for the child. Cutts also was convicted of abuse of a corpse,
burglary and child endangering for leaving Blake alone.
Ohio Jury Reaches Sentence for Ex - Cop, NYT, 27.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Pregnant-Woman-Dead.html
Trial of
Police Begins in 50-Shot Case
February
26, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON
The three
police detectives entered with lawyers at their sides and the stares of a
crowded courtroom at their backs. The men, who once worked undercover in the
shadows, were now center stage, sitting not among their fellow officers, but at
the defense table.
Fifteen months to the day after Sean Bell was killed in a blast of 50 police
bullets, and after rounds and rounds of court hearings, motions and
countermotions, the trial of three of the officers who fired their handguns that
cold morning began Monday in State Supreme Court in Queens. The proceedings
began with a quick start at two minutes before 9 a.m. and kept a brisk pace all
day.
Prosecutors went first, describing the detectives as a careless and incompetent
group run amok the morning of Nov. 25, 2006, unorganized and desperate for an
arrest as their nightclub detail was coming to a close. “The story of how this
tragedy occurred is a tale of carelessness,” said Charles A. Testagrossa, an
assistant district attorney, adding that the shooting “can only be characterized
as criminal.”
Defense lawyers argued that Mr. Bell’s actions that morning led the detectives
to believe themselves at deadly risk and provoked a shooting both justified and
reasonable. One lawyer went a step further, implying that Mr. Bell’s actions
were motivated by racial stereotype, and he described his client, Detective
Gescard F. Isnora, as a hard-working black man whose actions were misread that
morning because of assumptions.
“They see a Negro with a gun,” said the lawyer, Anthony L. Ricco, describing the
reactions of Mr. Bell, who was black, and his friends to Detective Isnora. “Just
another Negro on the street with a gun.”
The heightened emotions continued with the prosecution’s first witness, Mr.
Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, who brought a tearful jolt to the
proceedings in talking about her identification of Mr. Bell’s body.
Outside the courthouse, protesters marched, some carrying signs bearing the
numbers 1 to 50, for each shot fired. The demonstrations, while orderly, were
not orchestrated, with a prayer vigil before the trial, conducted by the Rev. Al
Sharpton, followed by fringe groups’ call for violence against the police.
Detective Isnora and Detective Michael Oliver face charges of first- and
second-degree manslaughter. A third detective, Marc Cooper, fired four shots and
hit no one, but one of his rounds struck an AirTrain terminal, and he was
charged with reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor.
The case is being heard by Justice Arthur J. Cooperman. The defendants waived
their right to a jury trial after their attempt to have the case moved out of
Queens failed. With no time needed to select jurors or to explain the nuances of
the law to them, the case moved quickly, from opening statements to the first
witnesses.
Prosecutors first laid out how on that Saturday morning around 4 a.m., Mr. Bell
was leaving Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, where he had been celebrating his
impending wedding — scheduled for later in the day — with childhood friends and
his father. The detectives were working undercover to make arrests at the club
for prostitution or drugs. The two groups may never have noticed each other if
not for a testy exchange between Mr. Bell and another man outside the front
door.
Prosecutors said Mr. Bell exchanged words with a man standing near a black sport
utility vehicle who had “muttered his unhappiness” that Mr. Bell was drunk “and
was overheard,” Mr. Testagrossa said. But he said the conversation never
escalated and ended without incident. “Not a single blow was thrown, and no gun
was displayed.”
The detectives saw the confrontation and decided to follow Mr. Bell. They have
said that they believed some of the men with Mr. Bell were armed. Detective
Isnora trailed Mr. Bell and two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent
Benefield, to their car, which was parked around the corner from the club, on
Liverpool Street. He did not call for backup as he approached the men, as is
standard in undercover operations, Mr. Testagrossa said, and his communication
with his team was lax.
Detective Isnora has said that he pinned his police shield to his collar, but
Mr. Testagrossa said it may not have been visible to Mr. Bell and his friends,
and that rather than shouts of “Police!” witnesses said they heard the detective
say, “Yo, let me holler at you.”
By that time, the three men were in the car. Mr. Bell drove forward, striking
the detective’s leg before hitting an unmarked van carrying Detective Oliver and
another detective, who was not charged in the case. Mr. Bell then reversed,
hitting a wall before speeding forward and hitting the van again.
Mr. Testagrossa said Mr. Guzman looked at the detective and saw only a man with
a gun, and felt a bullet tear into his shoulder before he shouted, “Let’s do
it!” to Mr. Bell, urging him to flee.
Mr. Testagrossa said Detective Oliver began shooting after Detective Isnora,
firing 31 shots, with the briefest of pauses to reload. “Had he paused to
reassess, he would have discovered that no gunfire was coming from the occupants
of the vehicle,” the prosecutor said.
Defense lawyers portrayed the shooting as the result of a lethal mixture: in Mr.
Bell’s case, of alcohol and bravado that escalated when he ignored orders from
the police to stop — and then tried to run over Detective Isnora.
“As he was trained to do, Detective Oliver took immediate action to protect the
life of Detective Isnora,” said James J. Culleton, a lawyer for Detective
Oliver. He said the prosecution’s “fatal flaw” was its “fixation” on the number
of police rounds fired. What was important, he said, was why he fired those
first shots. “The only reason Detective Oliver sits in this courtroom,” he
added, “is because he fired 31 shots.”
Mr. Ricco’s opening statements were less clinical and more emotional, referring
to Detective Isnora by his nickname, Jesse, and describing him as the quiet,
religious son of immigrants.
“Jesse was a person of color who answered the call of the community,” he said.
In front of juries, lawyers are often hesitant to criticize those who died. Mr.
Ricco appeared unconcerned about speaking ill of Mr. Bell while facing his
audience of one, the judge. He described Mr. Bell as drunk and spoiling for a
fight after the confrontation with the man outside the club. The man, identified
as Fabio Coicou, seemed to criticize his drunkenness, and Mr. Bell went into an
“angry fit,” Mr. Ricco said.
“He put on hold his dreams,” he said. “He put his marriage to his high school
sweetheart on the back burner.”
The lawyer said there was talk of guns between the men, and that Mr. Coicou
heard one of Mr. Bell’s friends say he had a “gat,” slang for a gun. Such
testimony would seem to bolster the detectives’ claims that they heard mention
of a gun.
When Mr. Bell struck Detective Isnora with the car, “He intended to run the
black man into the ground,” Mr. Ricco said.
Outside the courtroom, a lawyer for Mr. Bell’s fiancée criticized Mr. Ricco’s
statements. “In some ways, they played a race and class card today, and that’s
unfortunate,” the lawyer, Michael Hardy, said.
Ms. Bell, who took her fiancée’s name after he was killed, was not at the club
that night, but was called to the witness stand on Monday to describe her
relationship with Mr. Bell, and its tragic end. She answered questions from
Assistant District Attorney Peter T. Reese without tears, until he began asking
about when she saw his body at a hospital that morning. She fidgeted with a
tissue in her hands.
“Can you tell us where you saw him and what was his apparent physical
condition?” Mr. Reese asked.
Ms. Bell, dressed in black, wept, and remained silent for several moments. She
finally replied, “He was in the morgue.”
Testimony continued through the afternoon. A police crime scene analyst,
Detective Brian Skelton, used photographs he took at Club Kalua, with its bar,
dancer poles and small changing room, in describing the layout. A sign posted at
the club’s front door and seen in one of the photographs — “Must Buy 1 Drink
Every Half Hour” — led to further questions from the defense lawyers. But Mr.
Reese, one of the prosecutors, suggested that the rule could include
nonalcoholic drinks.
The last witness was Sean Spencer, 39, a bouncer at the club. He testified that
he saw no argument involving Mr. Bell, but he conceded that he may have missed
it. He said he heard 25 to 30 gunshots, then after a pause of 10 to 15 seconds,
another burst of 25 to 30 shots.
John Eligon and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting.
Trial of Police Begins in 50-Shot Case, NYT, 26.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/nyregion/26bell.html
Prosecutor Seeks Death for Ex - Cop
February
26, 2008
Filed at 10:15 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
CANTON,
Ohio (AP) -- A former police officer should face execution for killing his
pregnant lover and their unborn daughter, a prosecutor told jurors on Tuesday.
''Bobby Cutts deserves the maximum sentence allowed by law in the state of Ohio.
That's the sentence of death,'' assistant Stark County Prosecutor Dennis Barr
told jurors who convicted Cutts earlier this month and must recommend a
sentence.
Barr said the state had met its burden to prove that Cutts deserves to die for
his crimes.
Two appearances by Cutts on the witness stand were the emotional highlights of
his trial in the death of Jessie Davis, 26, and the nearly full-term fetus.
Two weeks ago, Cutts sobbed on the witness stand as he testified that he had
accidentally killed Davis with an elbow blow to the throat during a disagreement
at her northeast Ohio home and dumped her body at a park in a panic.
Defense attorney Fernando Mack said execution would be inappropriate because it
should be reserved for the ''worst of the worst,'' including serial killers.
''This is a situation that got out of hand,'' said Mack, who argued that
execution would leave the couple's 2 1/2-year-old son, Blake, an orphan.
''This penalty is to be used sparingly,'' Mack said.
The jury was scheduled to begin deliberating a sentence recommendation after
hearing the judge's instructions on the law.
Cutts, 30, was convicted of aggravated murder in the death of the fetus. He
could receive the death penalty, life in prison without parole or life with
parole eligibility after 20, 25 or 30 years.
If the jury recommends death, the judge can reduce the sentence to life,
something that has happened just seven times in Ohio in 27 years.
Jurors found Cutts not guilty of aggravated murder in the death of Davis but
convicted him of a lesser charge of murder in her death.
Cutts took the stand Monday to plead with jurors who convicted him. Sniffling
and his voice wavering at times, he accepted responsibility for his crimes.
''Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm asking you to spare my life,'' Cutts
said in an unsworn statement, which exempted him from cross-examination by
prosecutors.
Apologizing to the teary-eyed members of Davis' family sitting in the front row,
Cutts said he could not express in words how he felt knowing that he had killed
her and the baby.
Prosecutors told the jury that Cutts killed Davis and the unborn baby last June
to avoid making child support payments for the child.
Blake, who was found home alone, gave investigators their first clues to his
mother's disappearance when he said, ''Mommy's crying. Mommy broke the table.
Mommy's in the rug,'' and later, ''Daddy's mad.''
For more than a week, Cutts denied knowledge of her whereabouts as thousands
searched in the area. He finally led authorities to the body, wrapped in a
comforter.
Cutts, who also was convicted of abuse of a corpse, burglary and child
endangering for leaving Blake Davis alone, resigned as a patrolman from the
Canton police department.
Prosecutor Seeks Death for Ex - Cop, NYT, 26.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Pregnant-Woman-Dead.html
4
Decades After Shooting, Effort to Make Punishment Fit the Crime
February
23, 2008
The New York Times
By CATRIN EINHORN
CHICAGO —
What punishment should be imposed on a man who shot a police officer almost 40
years ago and fled to Canada, but went on to live an upstanding life as a
husband and father who worked in a library?
There was a rare answer here on Friday: Require him to give $250,000 to a
foundation that helps the families of injured Chicago police officers.
Joseph Pannell, 58, who admits that he shot a police officer here in 1969, will
serve just 30 days in jail and two years’ probation as part of a plea bargain
that legal experts called extremely unusual.
The driving force behind the arrangement, both sides said, was the former
Chicago police officer himself, Terrence Knox, whose right arm was permanently
damaged by the shooting.
“Something good had to come out of this,” Mr. Knox said Friday, after watching
Mr. Pannell accept the deal during a hearing in a Cook County courthouse.
“The easy way out would have been to have a trial, and cost this county hundreds
of thousands of dollars, have him go to jail, and cost the prison system
hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Knox said.
Mr. Pannell, who was charged with aggravated battery, attempted murder and
bail-jumping, could have faced up to 23 years in prison. All but an aggravated
battery charge were dropped.
The $250,000 came from Mr. Pannell and his family, and friends and lawyers in
the Chicago area, said Neil H. Cohen, Mr. Pannell’s lawyer.
The case began on March 7, 1969, when Mr. Knox, then 21, was patrolling near a
Chicago high school in a squad car. Prosecutors said that when he pulled over
and asked Mr. Pannell, then 19, why he was not in school, Mr. Pannell fired
several shots at him. While on bail, Mr. Pannell fled to Canada. He married a
Canadian and worked as a library research assistant.
In 2004, he was arrested, but fought extradition. Last month he gave up that
fight, saying he was inspired by the new political climate he saw in Chicago,
symbolized, he said, by the support of Mayor Richard M. Daley and other
political leaders for the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. Pannell, who has long gone by the name Gary Freeman, called the incident “an
American tragedy” and said he took responsibility for his actions.
“We must seek to move away from adversarial confrontation and towards peaceful
reconciliation and conflict resolution,” Mr. Pannell went on. “Today is about
acceptance of responsibility, atonement and redemption.”
Mr. Pannell’s lawyer declined to answer specific questions about the shooting.
But previously, John Norris, a lawyer for Mr. Pannell in Canada, said he had
acted in self-defense during a time of intense distrust between the Chicago
police and African-Americans.
The Chicago police have said Mr. Pannell was a member of the Black Panther
Party, though Mr. Pannell denies that.
Mr. Knox, who went on to become a businessman, said he had not spoken to Mr.
Pannell and did not wish to.
Defendants in violent cases are rarely offered plea bargains that include large
donations to charity instead of lengthy prison time, legal experts said.
“It almost looks like a bribe,” said Ronald Allen, a professor of law at
Northwestern University, who added that since the arrangement had the victim’s
blessing, it might not be unreasonable.
“In a way, it’s recompense for exactly the kind of harm that he caused.”
4 Decades After Shooting, Effort to Make Punishment Fit
the Crime, NYT, 23.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23panther.html
Former
Teacher Sentenced in Sex Case
February
20, 2008
Filed at 3:00 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
LAURENS,
S.C. (AP) -- A former middle school teacher was sent to prison for six years
Tuesday for having sexual encounters with five teenage boys. Authorities said
Allenna Ward, 24, met 14- and 15-year-old boys at the school where she taught as
well as at a motel, a park and behind a restaurant.
''I apologize from the depths of my heart,'' Ward said in court.
Police began investigating last year after school officials found a note
believed to have been written by Ward to one of the boys. Some of the victims
were students at Bell Street Middle School in Clinton, where Ward taught. She
was fired about a year ago.
Ward pleaded guilty in September to three counts of second-degree criminal
sexual conduct with a minor and three lewd acts on a minor.
Forensic psychiatrist Donna Schwartz-Watts said Ward is not a pedophile, but
rather a childlike victim suffering from personality disorders and a repressed
childhood. Schwartz-Watts said the minister's daughter lived a sheltered life
but really was a ''free spirit'' who never got a chance to break away from her
family.
Prosecutors painted Ward's crimes in a harsher light and said she violated the
trust that parents place in teachers.
Some of the victims' families attended the sentencing but did not speak during
the court hearing.
''I just feel like justice has been served,'' the sister of one victim said
after the hearing. ''We're just glad that it's all over.''
The Associated Press does not normally identify victims of sexual crimes.
Ward's lawyer Donald Hocker cited the psychiatric testimony in asking for home
imprisonment for his client. Hocker said Ward will be vulnerable to physical and
emotional abuse at the hands of other prisoners.
''It's an awful case with awful consequences, but Allenna Ward is not an awful
woman,'' Hocker said in court. He declined to speak to a reporter after the
hearing.
Ward was sentenced to 15 years in prison for each lewd act count, but the
punishments were suspended to six years. She also was sentenced to six years on
each second-degree criminal sexual conduct count. The sentences are to run
concurrently.
Former Teacher Sentenced in Sex Case, NYT, 20.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Teacher-Charged.html
In Guilty Plea, Actress’s Killer Changes Story to Robbery
February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
His original confession had the ring of truth: He was an illegal immigrant
working on a renovation job in a Greenwich Village building when the imperious
woman upstairs confronted him over construction noise.
They argued. She scratched him. Panicked that she would call the police and that
he would be deported, he punched her and pushed her to the floor. Mistakenly
thinking he had killed her, he hanged her from the shower rod of her bathroom,
in a staged suicide.
But in a courtroom on Thursday, the construction worker, Diego Pillco, 20, told
a very different story of how he killed the woman, Adrienne Shelly, a filmmaker,
on Nov. 1, 2006. Ms. Shelly, who was 40 and the mother of a 3-year-old daughter,
had just finished a film, “Waitress,” which opened to warm reviews after her
death.
Mr. Pillco, a short, boyish-looking man, speaking softly through a Spanish
translator, told a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that the argument
had not been over noise, but over a robbery.
He told the judge that Ms. Shelly had caught him stealing money from her purse
after he had slipped into the apartment at 15 Abingdon Square that she used as
an office.
When she picked up the phone to call the police, he said, he grabbed it and
covered her mouth as she started to scream.
“When she fell to the floor I saw a sheet and decided to choke her, and that’s
what happened,” Mr. Pillco said.
The judge, Carol Berkman, prodded him: “And you tied a sheet around her neck and
strung her up?”
“Yes,” Mr. Pillco replied, “and I made it look as if she committed suicide on
her own.”
It sounded like a straightforward confession to murder, which could have brought
Mr. Pillco a sentence of 25 years to life in prison, if he had been convicted by
a jury.
Instead, Mr. Pillco pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, first-degree
manslaughter, and was promised a fixed sentence of 25 years in a deal negotiated
with the Manhattan district attorney.
It was a hard choice dictated by the existence of the first confession,
according to an official in the district attorney’s office, who was not
authorized to speak on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
If he had gone to trial, the official said, Mr. Pillco probably would have stuck
by his original story, which might have convinced a jury that Ms. Shelly’s death
was merely reckless, even though the prosecution would have argued otherwise.
In that case, if convicted he could have received a maximum sentence of 15
years. It appeared that the defense may have feared the opposite outcome, that
Mr. Pillco would be convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Mr. Pillco’s
lawyer, Thomas Klein, of the Legal Aid Society, declined to comment on his
strategy.
Ms. Shelly’s husband, Andy Ostroy, her stepdaughter and other relatives sat
quietly in the courtroom during the hearing and declined to comment afterward.
But their grim faces conveyed what the judge said out loud: that their assent
had been given reluctantly. “Well, I’m not going to ask whether they’re happy
with this,” Justice Berkman said, after the lead prosecutor, Peter Casolaro,
assured her that the family had agreed to the plea.
There was little about Mr. Pillco’s first confession that added up, according to
prosecutors. He told detectives five days after the killing that Ms. Shelly had
confronted him in the apartment where he was working. The floor of that
apartment was covered in gypsum dust, the prosecutor said, yet Ms. Shelly’s
shoes, socks and the hems of her pants were clean.
Rather, it was Mr. Pillco’s shoeprints, traced in construction dust on the
toilet and the rim of the bathtub where Ms. Shelly’s husband found her hanging,
that gave him away.
Mr. Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, had come to the United States 8
to 10 months before the murder, the official said.
Ms. Shelly, who was born in Queens as Adrienne Levine, had just finished
“Waitress,” a film about an unhappily married, pregnant waitress who finds joy
in baking pies (and having an affair) that she wrote, directed and appeared in.
The film was later shown at the Sundance Film Festival and then went into wider
release.
Ms. Shelly was best known for her roles in Hal Hartley’s dark comedies “The
Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust.” She also appeared in more than two dozen Off
Broadway plays and in television shows.
In court on Thursday, after Justice Berkman asked, “What happened?” Mr. Pillco
gave this account.
He had been returning from lunch in the basement of the building when he saw Ms.
Shelly in an elevator. “The lady was coming up in the elevator,” he said. “So
when I saw her, I decided to rob her.”
He waited on an upstairs landing and watched her go into her apartment. She left
the door open, he said, and he slipped in, took her purse, and removed money; he
did not say how much.
After describing the fight for the phone and the struggle that ensued, he
stopped his recitation. After a conversation with his lawyer, he added one last
sentence. Mr. Pillco’s final words to the court were, “I just want to ask
forgiveness to her family.”
The judge replied, “I doubt that you will get that, sir.”
In Guilty Plea,
Actress’s Killer Changes Story to Robbery, NYT, 15.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/nyregion/15actress.html
In Big Mob Sweep, Gambino Leaders Are Indicted
February 7, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Federal and state authorities early Thursday began rounding up scores of
accused organized crime figures on a series of indictments charging murder,
racketeering, construction extortions and other crimes in the largest such sweep
in recent memory, law enforcement officials said.
About 80 people — among them the entire Gambino family hierarchy and reputed
figures from the Genovese and Bonanno families — are named in two indictments,
along with union and construction industry officials, the law enforcement
officials said.
By about 10 a.m., 52 people were already in custody, including the family’s
acting underboss, Domenico Cefalu, and consigliere, Joseph Corozzo, the
officials said. The acting boss, who prosecutors identified as John D’Amico,
known as Jackie the Nose, was not yet in custody and several officials said he
was believed to be on vacation.
The arrests were announced this morning at a news conference at the office of
United States Attorney Benton J. Campbell in Brooklyn.
The charges, which are being brought in United States District Court in Brooklyn
and state Supreme Court in Queens, also include seven murders — three dating
back more than a quarter century — along with racketeering, extortion and state
gambling charges, officials said.
“This investigation was extraordinary in that it penetrated the inner workings
of the Gambino family and simultaneously reached back in time to hold several
members of the Gambino family accountable for their prior crimes,” Mr. Campbell
said at the news conference this morning.
New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said the case was built in large
part with the aid of an informer who helped record hundreds of hours of mob
conversations.
“The message today is clear: organized crime still exists in the city and the
state of New York,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We like to think that it’s a vestige of the
past. It’s not. It is as unrelenting as weeds that continue to sprout in the
cracks of society.
“The second message, which is equally clear,” he added, “is that we will not
rest until organized crime is a distant memory in New York.”
The arrests by the F.B.I. and investigators from several other agencies were
coordinated with a sweep that netted dozens of accused organized crime figures
in Sicily. Those charges are not directly linked to the New York arrests, but
officials said they were part of a new American-Italian strategy aimed at
severing the close cooperative relationship between the Gambino family and the
Sicilian mob.
In addition to Mr. D’Amico, Mr. Cefalu and Mr. Corozzo, the 82-count federal
indictment charges six Gambino captains, who serve as the family’s midlevel
managers, along with more than a dozen soldiers, officials said. A large number
of family associates are also being charged.
The construction extortion aspects of investigation, which began more than three
years ago, focused on the trucking industry, which hauls away dirt excavated
from major construction projects, officials said. Several union officials were
also charged in a scheme to steal union benefits.
Among those charged was Anthony Delvescovo, a project manager and director of
tunnel operations for Schiavone Construction Company, a heavy construction firm
that has worked on major public works projects in the New York area, according
to the indictment.
Four trucking company executives, from companies including SRD Contracting,
Firehawk Enterprises, Jo-Tap Industries, Andrews Trucking and Dump Masters of NY
Inc., were also charged.
The trucking firms were licensed by the city’s Business Integrity Commission, an
agency which polices private carting companies and businesses that haul
construction debris. The commission, which also had a role in the investigation,
was expected to move to revoke the companies’ licenses today.
The construction projects cited in the case include a Nascar track in Staten
Island, where site preparation work was done but which was never completed
because racing officials scuttled the plan in the face of community opposition,
officials said.
Also the subject of extortions was the Liberty View Harbor project in Jersey
City, the officials said.
The seven murders include five that prosecutors are charging were committed by
one Gambino soldier, Charles Carneglia, between 1976 and 1990, officials said.
The first was the slaying of Albert Gelb, a highly decorated court officer who
arrested Mr. Carneglia in a Queens diner after noticing he was carrying a
pistol. Mr. Gelb was shot four days before he was to testify against Mr.
Carneglia in that case.
The last killing was an armored car guard, Jose Delgado Rivera, an armored car
guard who was shot in the back during a robbery, the officials said.
Law enforcement officials also described a case in which they said Mr. Corozzo,
the consigliere, ordered the shooting of a member of the competing Luchese crime
family. The victim, Robert Arena, was fatally shot at close range as he sat in a
car in Brooklyn in 1996 in retribution for the murder of a Corozzo crew member.
“The shooter in that case was already arrested,” New York City Police
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement. “But the boss who ordered it
was indicted today.”The federal case, which was investigated by the F.B.I. along
with the United States Department of Labor, the Waterfront Commission, the State
Organized Crime Task Force, among other agencies, was based on hundreds of hours
of secretly recorded conversations made by a construction executive who had
gained the confidence of crime family members, officials said.
In the state case, brought by the office of Queens District Attorney Richard A.
Browne, 26 people were charged with gambling, loan-sharking and promoting
prostitution, officials said. Twenty of the people had been arrested by about 10
a.m., officials said.
The leadership of the family — Mr. D’Amico, Mr. Cefalu and Mr. Corozzo — were
all charged in federal court with racketeering conspiracy and extortion and, if
convicted, face up to 20 years in prison on multiple counts.
Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.
In Big Mob Sweep,
Gambino Leaders Are Indicted, NYT, 7.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/nyregion/07cnd-mob.html?hp
Judge in
Courthouse Shooting Case Steps Down
January 31,
2008
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA —
The judge presiding over the quadruple-murder trial in the case of the 2005
shooting at the Fulton County Courthouse removed himself from the case on
Wednesday after an article in The New Yorker quoted him as saying of the
defendant, Brian Nichols, that “everyone in the world knows he did it.”
The move may reopen a trial that has been suspended for months, a delay that has
highlighted the growing expense of capital murder cases and the reluctance of
elected officials to pay for the defense.
The brunt of the frustration over the cost of the Nichols defense, $1.2 million
and counting, has fallen on the judge, Hilton M. Fuller, who halted the case
last year because Mr. Nichols’s lawyers and legal expenses were no longer being
paid.
Mr. Nichols’s lawyers, fighting a 54-count indictment, have offered to avoid the
trial entirely and enter a guilty plea if the prosecutor, Paul L. Howard Jr.,
would agree not to seek the death penalty. Mr. Howard, the Fulton County
district attorney, declined.
Prosecutors, politicians and even fellow judges have railed at Judge Fuller over
the delay. Legislators cut off new money to the public defense system and
threatened the judge with impeachment.
Judge Fuller stood firm, saying it was pointless to try a case without meeting
constitutional standards for an adequate defense.
His quotation in the New Yorker article, seeming to indicate a bias, gave his
critics new ammunition. The comment appeared in the context of a discussion of
the Nichols team’s intention to use their client’s mental state as a defense.
Mr. Nichols was on trial for rape in March 2005 when, the authorities say, he
broke free from a deputy, shot and killed a judge and a court reporter in a
courtroom, and then escaped, killing a second deputy and a federal agent.
“That’s their only defense, because everyone in the world knows he did it,” the
article quotes Judge Fuller as saying.
In his recusal order, Judge Fuller wrote, “In light of recent media reports, I
am no longer hopeful that I can provide a trial perceived to be fair for both
the state and the accused.”
He added: “Whether I was accurately quoted is immaterial. What is material is
the perception created by that attribution.”
Since the article appeared, Judge Fuller has told reporters that he was not
speaking for attribution when he talked with its author, Jeffrey Toobin.
Mr. Toobin said Wednesday that the interview was “clearly on the record.”
Judge in Courthouse Shooting Case Steps Down, NYT,
31.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/31atlanta.html
NY
police face judge, not jury, in groom shooting
Fri Jan 25,
2008
5:15pm EST
Reuters
By Edith Honan
NEW YORK
(Reuters) - Three New York City police officers charged in the 2006 shooting
death of an unarmed black man hours before his wedding waived their right to a
jury trial on Friday, saying any local jury would be biased against them.
Lawyers for the white, Hispanic and black detectives who fired 50 bullets at the
groom and his friends have argued that intense media coverage of the death of
Sean Bell, 23, had made it impossible to find a neutral jury in New York.
State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Cooperman set opening arguments for February
25.
The policemen appeared determined to avoid facing a jury in the New York City
borough of Queens, where Bell was killed and his two friends were wounded around
4 a.m. on November 25, 2006.
"The potential jury pool was poisoned right from the start," said Michael
Paladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association. "It has nothing to
do with the good people of Queens. They were hit with an avalanche of negative
publicity."
On Wednesday an appeals court rejected their request to move the trial outside
the city.
"I think that it is stunning that these officers want to do everything but be
accountable to the people they serve in Queens," civil rights advocate Al
Sharpton said in a statement.
"Now that their motion to change the venue has been denied, they do not want to
face a jury of their peers whom they serve and by whom they are paid."
Two of the detectives are charged with criminal manslaughter and face up to 25
years behind bars. The third detective is charged with reckless endangerment and
faces a maximum of one year.
Bell died in the 50-shot barrage as he and his friends left a strip club after a
bachelor party.
Police say the officers shot at Bell's car as it tried to run them over. They
had pursued the group in the mistaken belief someone had gone to fetch a gun to
settle a dispute that began inside the club. All three men were unarmed.
The venue dispute mirrors a similar case nearly a decade ago, when four police
officers charged in the fatal shooting of an unarmed West African man, Amadou
Diallo, were tried -- and later acquitted -- in Albany, the mostly white state
capital.
That shooting took place in the Bronx, which, like Queens, has a large minority
population.
(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Xavier Briand)
NY police face judge, not jury, in groom shooting,R,
25.1.2008,
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2537078320080125
Court
Rejects Venue Change in Police Killing
January 24,
2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON
A New York
state appeals court ruled on Wednesday against moving the trial of three
detectives charged in the killing of Sean Bell to a location out of New York
City, clearing the way for jury selection to begin in Queens on Feb. 4.
Judges at the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, which
oversees Queens courts, denied the motion for a change of venue in the trial in
the Nov. 25, 2006, killing of Mr. Bell outside a strip club in Queens. But
lawyers for the detectives may renew their request after jury selection is
completed, a task that is expected to last longer than usual because of the
extraordinary amount of publicity surrounding Mr. Bell’s death.
Undercover detectives investigating the strip club followed Mr. Bell, 23, who
was to be married that day, and his two friends to their car, suspecting them of
going to get guns after an earlier argument with another group.
In the confrontation that followed, the officers shot 50 times, killing Mr.
Bell, who was driving the car, and wounding his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent
Benefield. No gun was found in the car.
Detectives Michael Oliver and Gescard F. Isnora face charges of first- and
second-degree manslaughter. Detective Marc Cooper faces two misdemeanor charges
of reckless endangerment.
The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, praised Wednesday’s ruling.
“Today’s decision reflects that which we said all along,” Mr. Brown said in a
statement, “that a fair and impartial jury can be selected from among the 2.3
million residents of Queens County.”
Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said he
was dismayed by the ruling.
“Both the evidence and our arguments were powerful and had merit,” he said.
“However, the court has spoken, and we will prepare for trial in Queens. Neither
innocence nor guilt of our detectives was decided today.”
The decision appeared to dispel fears among supporters of Mr. Bell’s family of a
repeat of what happened in the murder trial of four officers who killed Amadou
Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, in a hail of 41 bullets outside his
apartment in the Bronx. That trial was moved to Albany because of pretrial
publicity, and the officers were acquitted in 2000.
While Mr. Diallo and Mr. Bell were both black, comparisons between the two
shootings have never been neat or simple. The officers who shot Mr. Diallo were
all white, but two of the detectives charged in the Bell killing are black,
including the one who fired first. And while Mr. Diallo died after reaching for
his wallet, Mr. Bell, the police have said, was trying to ram the officers with
his car. Thousands of people were arrested during protests over the Diallo
shooting.
Nonetheless, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has appeared at rallies at the side of
Mr. Bell’s family and fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, praised the decision as a
civil rights victory.
“Though this does not give an advantage or disadvantage for any of the involved
parties, it does take the stain of an unfair and uneven playing field from at
least the geographic questions that surround these trials,” Mr. Sharpton said in
a statement, calling the trial date “Super Monday in the civil rights movement
around this country.”
Lawyers for the three detectives said that pretrial publicity had hopelessly
skewed public opinion against their clients. The lawyers conducted a poll of 600
prospective jurors suggesting that 60.5 percent believed the shooting to be “unjustified.”
In a poll by the prosecutors, only 35.5 percent of potential jurors “report
having formed an opinion about this case.”
The defense must now decide whether to waive a jury trial before Justice Arthur
J. Cooperman and seek a bench trial instead.
The four justices of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn
who delivered the ruling were Thomas A. Dickerson, Anita R. Florio, William F.
Mastro and Howard Miller.
Court Rejects Venue Change in Police Killing, NYT,
24.12008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/nyregion/24bell.html
In
Trial, Defense Casts Slain Girl, 7, as a Terror
January 17,
2008
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN
Nixzmary
Brown may have been only 7 years old when she died, battered and starved, in her
family’s Brooklyn apartment two years ago. She may have weighed only 36 pounds —
the same as a healthy child half her age.
But for all that, a lawyer for her stepfather told jurors on Wednesday at the
opening of his murder trial, Nixzmary was a force of destruction who terrorized
her five younger siblings. What’s more, he said, she refused to be disciplined,
slipping the ropes that bound her to the chair in her room, just out of reach of
the litter box she was forced to use as a toilet.
“She was a little Houdini,” said the lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz.
Nixzmary needed to be corrected, Mr. Schwartz said, and on the last night of her
life, after she helped herself to a forbidden container of yogurt, her
stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, administered a beating.
Mr. Rodriguez hit Nixzmary with his hands and with a belt, thrust her head under
running cold water in the bathtub, and left her naked and shivering on the bare
floor of her room, Mr. Schwartz said.
But the state would not prove that he had killed her, Mr. Schwartz said.
Nixzmary died, Mr. Schwartz said, only after Mr. Rodriguez left the room, and
the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago — or, as he referred to her, “Mommy
dearest” — took over.
So went Mr. Schwartz’s defense of the man who has been widely vilified since
news of Nixzmary’s death shook the city in 2006.
It did not appear to sway a jury that included 10 women, most of them mothers. A
couple of them scowled skeptically.
During the prosecutor’s opening statements, several jurors appeared to wipe away
tears.
Mr. Rodriguez himself did not appear comfortable with Mr. Schwartz’s approach.
When the prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, spoke, Mr. Rodriguez, 29, a slight man with a
pocked face and fine black hair that lay against his skull, fixed her in his
gaze. When Mr. Schwartz addressed the jury, Mr. Rodriguez stared down into his
water cup, then nervously began tapping it on the defense table.
Prosecutors say that Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago killed Nixzmary together, by
degrees, in their apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Both of them are charged with
second-degree murder — causing her death with “depraved indifference” to her
life. An autopsy found Nixzmary’s frail body covered in bruises in various
stages of healing, with massive hemorrhaging under her scalp, Ms. Dwimoh said.
“How she died, that tells us how she lived,” Ms. Dwimoh told the jurors in a
voice barely above a whisper. “And it was because of how she lived that she
died.”
Ms. Santiago will be tried after Mr. Rodriguez.
Even as Nixzmary’s life was slipping away on her bedroom floor, Ms. Dwimoh said,
Mr. Rodriguez did not call 911 or take her to a hospital.
“He wasn’t no daddy,” Ms. Dwimoh, the chief of the crimes against children
bureau of the Brooklyn attorney’s office, told the jurors.
Daddies, she said, “don’t beat their little girls to the point where they don’t
respond,” and they don’t decline to get medical help for the children in their
charge.
“And daddies,” Ms. Dwimoh said, “don’t blame their children for their actions.
Murderers do.”
Mr. Schwartz defended Mr. Rodriguez’s approach to parenting as that of an
overtaxed man doing his best to maintain order in a chaotic household.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘Cesar Rodriguez was beating up this little 36-pound,
7-year-old girl,’ ” Mr. Schwartz said. “But think about it — all the other kids
were younger and smaller.” Nixzmary, he said, would cut and hit the other
children, and Mr. Rodriguez feared for their safety. “In her case there was a
danger to the other children,” Mr. Schwartz said.
As for what Nixzmary did to provoke Mr. Rodriguez’s wrath on the last night of
her life, Mr. Schwartz said, “It’s easy to say, ‘Aw, he killed the kid and beat
her because of yogurt.’ Many of us don’t have yogurt problems” — here he
gestured to his own well-fed midsection — “but when you’re poor and you can’t
afford unlimited amounts of food and you have six children, you have to make
sure that everyone gets what they’re entitled to get, so that you can ensure
that everyone stays healthy.”
Ms. Dwimoh had told jurors that Mr. Rodriguez had bought enough yogurt for all
the children that night but gave none to Nixzmary. “That underfed, starving
child was murdered because she had the unmitigated gall to feed her hunger,” she
said.
Mr. Schwartz portrayed Ms. Santiago as the clear villain, a manipulative woman
prone to fits of rage who beat Nixzmary viciously, saying she was responsible in
an attack that sent the girl to the hospital just weeks before her death in
January 2006.
Mr. Rodriguez, Mr. Schwartz said, was Ms. Santiago’s knight in shining armor, a
hard-working man who got her and her brood out of the homeless shelter system.
He took the six children, two of them his, took them to nearby parks, bought
them toys and, “most importantly, tried to teach them right from wrong,” Mr.
Schwartz said.
From his abusive father, Mr. Rodriguez had picked up some strange ways of
showing his love — holding Nixzmary’s head under the freezing water, for
example, as Mr. Rodriguez’s own father had done to him, Mr. Schwartz said. But
he wanted only the best for the children, he said.
At day’s end, Ms. Dwimoh called her first witness, the family’s upstairs
neighbor, whom Ms. Santiago had summoned to the apartment hours after Nixzmary’s
beating. The neighbor, Ulvis Rivera, wept uncontrollably when shown a photograph
of Nixzmary’s body.
On cross-examination, Ms. Rivera, a home health aide, conceded that much of the
time that she was in the family’s apartment waiting for the police, Mr.
Rodriguez was trying to resuscitate Nixzmary.
On the other hand, she testified, it was clear that the girl was already dead.
In Trial, Defense Casts Slain Girl, 7, as a Terror, NYT,
17.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/nyregion/17nixzmary.html
Justices
Uphold New York’s Trial Judge System
January 16,
2008
Filed at 10:35 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The Supreme Court unanimously upheld New York's unique system of
choosing trial judges Wednesday, setting aside critics' concerns that political
party bosses control the system.
''A political party has a First Amendment right to limit its membership as it
wishes and to choose a candidate-selection process that will in its view produce
the nominee who best represents its political platform,'' Justice Antonin Scalia
wrote for the court.
In New York, primary voters elect convention delegates who choose candidates for
the judgeships. Once nominated, those candidates run on the general election
ballot. In practice, they frequently have no opposition.
Unsuccessful candidates for judgeships and a watchdog group filed a lawsuit
challenging the system. A federal district judge and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals agreed that it is very difficult for candidates to get on the ballot
if they don't have support of the party leaders.
In striking down the system, the two federal courts said judgeship candidates
who are not the choice of the party leaders are excluded from elections by an
onerous process that violates their First Amendment rights.
The high court on Wednesday reversed the lower courts.
Scalia said there is nothing unconstitutional about the process. The system's
opponents ''complain not of the state law, but of the voters' (and their elected
delegates') preference for the choices of the party leadership,'' Scalia said.
He said the state legislature is free to return to a primary if it wishes.
Justice John Paul Stevens chimed in with a brief opinion distinguishing between
a constitutional system and wise public policy, resorting to the words of former
Justice Thurgood Marshall. ''The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures
from enacting stupid laws,'' Stevens said, quoting Marshall.
Critics have said the conventions are patronage-driven affairs in which allies
of party leaders are rewarded with judgeships and all others are shut out.
The appeals court said that between 1990 and 2002, almost half the state's
elections for Supreme Court justice -- trial judges in New York's judiciary --
were uncontested, calling them ''little more than ceremony.''
The appeals court ordered the state to dispense with the conventions and switch
to primary elections until state lawmakers come up with a new plan. Many legal
and civics groups have come out in favor of appointing judges in New York.
The U.S. Supreme Court previously has ruled that states can decide whether to
use conventions or primaries to nominate candidates. States also can choose to
have judges appointed rather than elected.
Margarita Lopez Torres became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit after Democratic
leaders in Brooklyn blocked her from getting the party's nomination for a
Supreme Court judgeship. She said the leaders turned against her shortly after
her election as a civil court judge when she would not hire people they
recommended. Three years later, Lopez Torres said they offered her a second
chance if she would hire a leader's daughter. She refused.
The state, the Democratic and Republican parties and the elections board joined
to ask the high court to reverse the appeals court ruling. Former New York Mayor
Ed Koch was among a diverse group of politicians and legal groups asking the
court to uphold the lower court rulings.
The state Legislature adopted the nominating conventions 86 years ago. Lawmakers
scrapped direct primaries for New York's Supreme Court justices because of the
potentially corrupting influence of having prospective judges raising campaign
money. Other judges in New York are elected through primaries.
The plaintiffs have said the current system leads to cozy relationships among
judges, lawyers and politicians.
The case is New York Board of Elections v. Torres, 06-766.
Justices Uphold New York’s Trial Judge System, NYT,
16.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Judicial-Elections.html?hp
Man
sentenced in Calif. kidnap scheme
12 January
2008
USA Today
LOS ANGELES
(AP) — A Ukrainian man convicted in a kidnapping scheme that resulted in the
deaths of five people who were dumped in a Northern California reservoir was
sentenced to life in prison on Friday.
Petro
Krylov, 35, was part of a ring that sought to kidnap affluent Russian business
people in Los Angeles and extort money from their families, prosecutors said.
The victims were killed regardless of whether the ransoms were paid.
Two other men, Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, were also convicted and
sentenced to death last year.
During Krylov's 31-day trial in U.S. District Court last year, his attorneys
argued that Mikhel and Kadamovas threatened to harm Krylov's family if he did
not help them with in the plot. U.S. District Judge S. James Otero rejected that
claim during Friday's sentencing, when Krylov was given four consecutive life
sentences.
Krylov was found guilty of playing a role in the death of three of the ring's
five victims. One of them, Alexander Umansky, was his former boss at a stereo
shop, with whom he had a falling-out after being fired.
Umansky's bloated body was recovered by divers from the New Melones Reservoir
near Yosemite National Park in 2002. Four other bodies, tied to weights, were
also recovered.
In all, about $1.2 million in ransom was collected, according to prosecutors.
Krylov, an illegal immigrant, was spared the death penalty last May when a jury
deadlocked during the penalty phase of his trial.
Man sentenced in Calif. kidnap scheme, UT, 12.1.2008,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-12-reservoir-bodies_N.htm
Jurors
in a Cape Cod Murder Case Testify About Racial Remarks
January 11,
2008
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
BARNSTABLE,
Mass. — More than a year after it convicted a black trash hauler of a shocking
murder on Cape Cod, a jury returned to court here Thursday for an extraordinary
hearing on whether racism influenced its verdict.
The defendant in that trial, Christopher M. McCowen, is serving a life sentence
for raping and killing Christa Worthington, a white fashion writer from a
wealthy family, at her bungalow in Truro in 2002. But three jurors now say that
others made racist remarks during the trial; if Judge Gary A. Nickerson of
Barnstable Superior Court finds those contentions credible, he could order a new
trial.
Judge Nickerson questioned 7 of the 14 jurors on Thursday, calling them into the
courtroom one at a time and asking whether the issue of race came up during
their deliberations. Some of the jurors’ answers contradicted those of others,
and many said their memories of the deliberations, which took place in November
2006, were vague.
Most of the testimony Thursday concerned comments that the only black woman on
the jury, Roshena Bohanna, said she heard two white jurors make.
One of those jurors remarked that the bruises on Ms. Worthington’s body, as seen
in evidence photographs, were consistent with “if a big black man hit her,” Ms.
Bohanna testified.
The other, Ms. Bohanna said, told her fellow jurors that she feared Mr. McCowen
because he was black.
After she confronted those women, Ms. Bohanna added, a male juror who is black
admonished her and said, “That’s why I don’t like black people.”
Two other jurors, a white man and a white woman, corroborated some of Ms.
Bohanna’s statements, though they had slightly different recollections of
various remarks. They also said that the juror who remarked on the bruises,
Marlo George, almost got into a physical confrontation with Ms. Bohanna in the
jury room after Ms. Bohanna accused her of racism.
“She was telling Roshena not to pull the race card,” Rachel Huffman, one of the
jurors, said of Ms. George, confirming Ms. Bohanna’s version of events.
Ms. Huffman was removed from the jury during deliberations because she had been
recorded complaining about the police to her jailed boyfriend and discussing
reports of the case with him. The jury had been deadlocked, but two days after
an alternate replaced Ms. Huffman, a guilty verdict was reached.
The jurors who testified sat in a chair next to Judge Nickerson, their voices
often so quiet that spectators strained to hear. When they paused in their
answers, the courtroom was silent but for Mr. McCowen’s jangling shackles.
Ms. Bohanna, Ms. Huffman and a third juror, Normand Audet, raised their concerns
about racism a month after the verdict, but racial tensions loomed over the case
from the moment of Mr. McCowen’s arrest in April 2005. Not only had Mr. McCowen
confessed to the crime, prosecutors said then, but DNA found on Ms.
Worthington’s body matched his.
Mr. McCowen’s lawyer, Robert George, said at trial that the police had coerced
the confession; Mr. McCowen, he said, had engaged in consensual sex with Ms.
Worthington but had not killed her. The police, Mr. George told the jury then,
refused to acknowledge that possibility because of Mr. McCowen’s race. “As soon
as they see the black garbage man,” he said, “it’s rape.”
Mr. George, who is not related to Ms. George, collected affidavits from the
three jurors who believe the verdict was racially biased, submitting them to the
court in December 2006 along with a request for a new trial.
“The testimony you heard today doesn’t require social scientists to tell you
there were racially biased statements,” Mr. George said after the hearing, which
is to continue Friday.
But Judge Nickerson’s task may be more complicated. Ms. George, the juror
accused of saying Ms. Worthington’s bruises looked as though they had been
inflicted by “a big black man,” said she had made a similar comment but had not
mentioned race.
Carol Cahill, the juror Ms. Bohanna accused of saying she feared Mr. McCowen
because he is black, also denied mentioning Mr. McCowen’s race.
Ms. George did say that at one point in the deliberations, she had referred to
Mr. McCowen as “a 200-pound black man” who had come to Ms. Worthington’s house
in the middle of the night looking for sex, but only because she had read it in
a police report.
“I was just using it as a descriptive element,” she said of Mr. McCowen’s race.
There were also contradictory statements Thursday as to whether another juror, a
black man, disparaged blacks during the deliberations and whether some jurors,
while sequestered at a hotel one night, had mocked Ms. Bohanna’s accusations of
racism.
Mr. George said after the hearing that if every juror had given identical
testimony it would be suspect. “When people are telling the truth,” he said,
“stories don’t perfectly fit like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Jurors in a Cape Cod Murder Case Testify About Racial
Remarks, NYT, 11.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11cape.html
Ga.
Court Examines Banishment Policy
January 8,
2008
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
ATLANTA
(AP) -- An unusual question is before the Georgia Supreme Court: Should
banishment of criminals be banned?
Though Georgia's judges are technically outlawed from banishing offenders, some
have skirted the rule by restricting them from all but one of the state's 159
counties. Now, one convict is challenging the practice, claiming it is
unconstitutional.
''It's a throwback to the dark ages,'' McNeill Stokes, the defense attorney who
argued the case Monday, said in an interview. ''The whole point behind this is
zealous prosecutors wanting to get rid of problems in their counties.''
State attorneys contend the orders are a way to rid criminals from populous
areas and protect victims from repeat offenses. But some defense attorneys see
them as thinly disguised efforts to evade a Georgia constitutional provision
that explicitly forbids courts from ''banishment beyond the limits of the
state.''
The case revolves around Gregory Mac Terry, who pleaded guilty to assault and
stalking charges. According to court documents, he violated a restraining order
by sneaking into his estranged wife's home, forced her into his car and then
threatened her with scissors.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and 10 more years on probation, and a
judge added a condition that he be banned from all Georgia's counties except
Toombs County in southeast Georgia. His attorney says that condition kept him in
prison longer, because he couldn't complete a work-release program in another
county.
State attorney Paula Smith Sr. said the ban is reasonable, because Terry wrote a
letter saying he wouldn't forget his wife when he was released.
''What we're losing sight of here is the purpose, and that was to help Mr.
Terry's wife from his documented obsession of her,'' Smith said, adding that the
court was ''trying to safeguard this woman.''
The banished rarely move to the remote counties where they are sent, and lawyers
say some flee the state altogether. DeKalb County alone has banished dozens of
offenders to Echols County, which sits on the Florida border.
During arguments Monday, justices peppered attorneys with questions about how
the policy works logistically.
For example, they asked, how would an offender even get to the county where he
was supposed to live without passing through counties he was banned from?
''You could fly,'' Justice Robert Benham quipped.
------
On the Net:
http://www.gasupreme.us
Ga. Court Examines Banishment Policy, NYT, 8.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Banning-Banishment.html
50 Years
to Life for NYC Club Bouncer
January 4,
2008
Filed at 9:56 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
NEW YORK
(AP) -- A nightclub bouncer has been sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for
two killings he claimed police committed.
Stephen Sakai declined to speak as he was sentenced Thursday in state Supreme
Court. The 32-year-old was convicted last month of second-degree murder in the
2005 deaths of Wayne Tyson and Edwin Mojica.
During his trial, Sakai claimed police killed the victims because they were
helping him gather evidence against corrupt officers.
Authorities said Sakai made incriminating statements about the killings after he
was arrested in a third killing, this one during a shootout outside a trendy
Manhattan lounge in May 2006. Sakai is awaiting trial on a second-degree murder
charge in that case.
50 Years to Life for NYC Club Bouncer, NYT, 4.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Lounge-Shooting.html
Free in
Parents’ Murders, and Weighing Future in Law
January 4,
2008
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN and ANAHAD O'CONNOR
In the
first few days after winning his freedom, Martin H. Tankleff — who was sent to
prison 17 years ago for two murders he insists he never committed — relished the
things that were little more than routine to him half a lifetime ago.
He got up early and watched the sun rise, enjoyed the taste of fresh coffee
brewed outside the confines of prison walls and went on a ski trip.
The past few days, Mr. Tankleff said, were mostly days of joy — except for the
moments on New Year’s Day when he stood in a cemetery and mourned at the graves
of his parents, Seymour and Arlene Tankleff. The couple were found beaten and
stabbed to death in their home in Belle Terre, on the North Shore of Long
Island, on Sept. 17, 1988.
“It was beyond emotional,” he said of his trip to their graves. “But I had to
go.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the Suffolk County district attorney unexpectedly
announced that he would not pursue new murder charges against Mr. Tankleff, 36,
whose conviction was overturned last month by an appeals court that ordered a
new trial, based on new evidence and witnesses pointing to other suspects.
Thursday morning, for the first time in nearly 20 years, Mr. Tankleff found
himself contemplating a future in which he would no longer have to assert his
innocence.
Standing at a lectern in the New York office of Baker Botts, one of the law
firms working on his case, wearing a pale blue shirt with a black and white
button that read, “Free Marty,” Mr. Tankleff thanked his supporters for helping
sustain his faith that he would someday be set free.
Accompanied by friends, family and lawyers — some of whom have represented him
free for over a decade — he said that he wanted to finish college. (He took some
college courses while he was in prison.)
After that, he said, he would like to study law. And ultimately, Mr. Tankleff
said, he would like to be able to repay in kind the legal assistance he had
received and help others wrongfully convicted.
“I have a lot to do,” he said, adding: “I never lived in a prison. I resided
there.”
Mr. Tankleff’s lawyers were quick to give their client credit for forging his
own path toward freedom, describing him as a tenacious correspondent who wrote
thousands of letters to lawyers, judges and investigators and appealed widely
for help from friends and acquaintances.
Stephen L. Braga, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Tankleff for more than 12
years, described meeting him for the first time in the fall of 1995 at the
Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, N.Y., which he described as “a
dark, dreary, desperate place.”
Mr. Braga, who then coordinated cases that the law firm, Miller, Cassidy,
Larroca and Lewin, handled without charge, was told about Mr. Tankleff by
another lawyer at the firm, Barry Pollack. Mr. Tankleff came to the attention of
Mr. Pollack through an intern at the firm, Laura Taichman, who went to high
school with Mr. Tankleff.
For more than 10 years, lawyers from several firms handled aspects of Mr.
Tankleff’s case without charge.
“We instantly liked him,” said Mr. Braga. “We’ve been representing Marty through
highs and lows, close calls, disappointments, federal courts, state courts.”
Another lawyer, Bruce A. Barket, said that he was thankful for Mr. Tankleff’s
release, but was bothered that it had taken so long. “Our justice system is
deeply flawed to allow somebody like Marty Tankleff to spend this much time in
prison for a crime that others committed,” he said.
Mr. Tankleff was asked whether he planned to sue the authorities in Suffolk
County for wrongful arrest. He referred the question to the lawyers standing
next to him, who said that no decision had yet been made. Mr. Tankleff also said
that he had not made any decision about whether to write a book.
In the last week, he said, he has been struck by how some things have remained
the same even after 17 years — like taxis speeding through the streets of
Manhattan — while technology and other aspects of life have changed so
immensely.
But Mr. Tankleff, too, has changed. He still writes letters, but in the last
week, instead of scribbling them by hand, he has learned to use e-mail. More
than anything else, Mr. Tankleff said, he is grateful that his lawyers,
relatives and supporters never stopped paying attention to his letters.
“It’s just been a long, long fight,” he said. “I never gave up. They never gave
up.”
Free in Parents’ Murders, and Weighing Future in Law, NYT,
4.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/nyregion/04tankleff.html
DNA
Tests Get Man Freed After 27 Years
January 3,
2008
Filed at 12:42 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
DALLAS (AP)
-- A Dallas man wrongly imprisoned since 1981 is free after a judge recommended
overturning his 1981 aggravated sexual assault conviction.
With several of his eight siblings cheering his release, 47-year-old Charles
Chatman was released on his own recognizance after serving nearly 27 years of a
99-year sentence.
That made Chatman the longest imprisoned inmate of 15 from Dallas County to be
cleared by DNA testing. The 15 is the most of any county in the nation. In all,
at least 30 Texas inmates have been cleared by DNA testing, according to the
Innocence Project. That's the most of any state in the nation.
DNA Tests Get Man Freed Affter 27 Years, NYT, 3.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-DNA-Exoneration.html
Long
Island Man
Won’t Be Tried Again in Murders
January 3,
2008
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO and BRUCE LAMBERT
HAUPPAUGE,
N.Y. — The Suffolk County district attorney said on Wednesday that he would not
retry Martin H. Tankleff for the 1988 murders of his parents and that he would
ask Gov. Eliot Spitzer to appoint a special prosecutor to reinvestigate the
case.
The district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, said he would seek to dismiss all
charges against Mr. Tankleff, who was 17 at the time of the murders and is now
36, “because it is no longer possible to reasonably assert that the case against
Tankleff would be successful.”
Protections against double jeopardy would preclude trying Mr. Tankleff on some
charges, and recent appellate court decisions in unrelated cases would make it
impossible to prosecute him on others, Mr. Spota said. “The prosecution of any
20-year-old murder case is difficult,” he added.
Mr. Tankleff, interviewed at his lawyer’s office late Wednesday, took Mr.
Spota’s announcement as vindication. “I’m completely exonerated,” he said. “I’m
an innocent man. It’s been 20 years, but it’s over now.”
Mr. Tankleff’s parents, Seymour and Arlene Tankleff, were found bludgeoned and
stabbed in their waterfront home in Belle Terre, on the North Shore of Long
Island, on Sept. 17, 1988.
In the last four years, investigators hired by the Tankleff family have found
evidence that they say points to a former business associate of Seymour
Tankleff’s as a suspect in the murders. It was that evidence, primarily, that
led the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court to order a new trial for
Mr. Tankleff last month. He was freed on Dec. 27 after relatives posted a $1
million bond.
Mr. Spota discounted the defense team’s alternative theory as “not supported by
the credible evidence.” But he said he would ask Mr. Spitzer to appoint a
special prosecutor to determine whether there was enough evidence to bring
charges against “other individuals the defense claims participated in these
murders.”
A spokesman for the governor said Mr. Spitzer would wait for the formal request
before considering it.
Mr. Spota said he would appear in Suffolk County Court on Jan. 18 to formally
request that the indictments against Mr. Tankleff be dismissed.
In proposing that a special prosecutor become involved, Mr. Spota effectively
washed his hands of the case. “This office’s prosecution and criminal
investigation into the murder of Arlene and Seymour Tankleff has ended,” Mr.
Spota said. He did not take questions from reporters.
Martin Tankleff’s lawyer, Bruce A. Barket, said, “It would have been appropriate
for them to dismiss this case long ago, but the district attorney deserves
credit.”
Mr. Tankleff was convicted of the murders by a Suffolk County jury in 1990,
largely on the basis of an incomplete confession, written out for him by
detectives, which he repudiated almost immediately and never signed. The
confession was elicited in a lengthy interrogation during which detectives
tricked him, they later admitted: They told him that his father — who was in a
coma for a month after being attacked but who never awakened before he died —
had regained consciousness and identified him as his attacker.
James McCready, the Suffolk detective who led the interrogation, said during the
trial that such tactics were not uncommon because all criminal suspects have one
trait in common: “They all lie.”
The private investigation that led to Mr. Tankleff’s freedom began when a former
New York City detective, Jay Salpeter, received a letter from Mr. Tankleff in
2001, asking him to review the case. From the beginning, Mr. Tankleff and his
family — a sister, several cousins, and aunts and uncles who supported his claim
of innocence — asserted that the killings were carried out on orders from Jerard
Steuerman, a business partner of Seymour Tankleff.
Mr. Steuerman, who lives in Florida, attended a regular poker game at the
Tankleffs’ house the night before the murders and was, by the accounts of those
who were there that night, the last to leave.
Mr. Steuerman owed more than $500,000 to the elder Mr. Tankleff and had
quarreled with him over the terms of repayment, according to evidence presented
at Martin Tankleff’s trial. But the police said that they had eliminated Mr.
Steuerman as a suspect based on interviews and on an alibi, despite the fact
that he fled a few days after the murders. He was tracked down by the police,
who wanted him as a witness, in California, where he was living under an assumed
name.
Mr. Salpeter unspooled a thread of connections that led from Mr. Steuerman to
one of his associates, Joseph Creedon, then to a half dozen witnesses who gave
sworn depositions that Mr. Creedon had told them that he and another man had
killed the Tankleffs.
Suffolk County Court Judge Stephen Braslow heard the new evidence during
episodic hearings in which Mr. Tankleff’s lawyers sought a new trial. But the
judge dismissed the new witnesses as “a cavalcade of nefarious characters.”
The appellate court, in reversing Judge Braslow, noted that many of the
witnesses did not know each other, yet they all implicated Mr. Creedon and Mr.
Steuerman.
“It appears that the county court never considered that the cumulative effect of
the new evidence created a probability that, had such evidence been received at
trial, the verdict would have been more favorable to the defendant,” the
appellate court said, concluding, “This evidence warrants a new trial.”
In conceding that prosecutors would probably not win a conviction against Mr.
Tankleff, Mr. Spota seemed to take issue with the Appellate Division’s opinion
by insisting that the real impediment was not new evidence pointing to someone
else, but the new restrictions against certain types of prosecution.
In particular, a 2004 appellate decision bars prosecutors from bringing multiple
murder charges in the same case, as was done in the Tankleff trial. Jurors were
asked to consider charges of intentional murder and “depraved indifference”
murder, a category that carries the same penalty as intentional murder but for
which the burden of proof is somewhat less. In his mother’s murder, Mr. Tankleff
was acquitted of intentional murder and convicted of depraved indifference
murder. In the murder of his father, the jury found him guilty of intentional
murder.
Because he was acquitted of the intentional murder of his mother, protections
against double jeopardy would prevent prosecutors from bringing that charge
against him again in the death of Mrs. Tankleff, Mr. Spota said.
And since “the evidence clearly shows that both victims were intentionally
murdered,” Mr. Spota said, Mr. Tankleff could not be charged in his mother’s
death.
“I believe that attempting to retry half of the case against Tankleff is futile,
and I will not do it,” Mr. Spota said
Mr. Tankleff seemed a little stunned as he absorbed the fact that he was free.
“I lost 18 years of my life,” he said.
Long Island Man Won’t Be Tried Again in Murders, NYT,
3.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/nyregion/03tankleff.html
31
states introducing new laws
1 January
2008
USA Today
By Gregg Zoroya
New laws
for 2008 — inspired by some hot-button issues of 2007 — take effect this week,
including an airline passenger bill of rights, mortgage restrictions,
environmental safeguards, illegal-immigration constraints and bans on the risky
uses of technology while driving.
The
National Conference of State Legislatures says 31 states unveiled new laws
Tuesday. Among the most common decrees are hikes in the minimum wage in 14
states.
Among the more unusual changes: American flags sold in Minnesota must be made in
the USA, shoes and sportswear fashioned from Kangaroo hides can be imported into
California, and anyone selling a Texas home must disclose whether it was once a
methamphetamine factory.
The nightmare of being trapped in a JetBlue aircraft for up to 10 hours spawned
New York's passenger bill of rights, which passed unanimously.
The law comes on the heels of a number of delays last winter at John F. Kennedy
International Airport that left some passengers stranded on the tarmac for
hours.
New York state Sen. Charles Fuschillo, a Long Island Republican who co-sponsored
the bill, said Tuesday that other states are showing an interest in similar
action.
"I hope this wakes up people two ways," Fuschillo says. "(I hope it) wakes up
the airline industry that they have to treat customers better and wakes up
Congress that this should be done on a national level."
Under the law, airlines must provide fresh food, water, air and clean restrooms
for passengers on any aircraft stuck on a tarmac for more than three hours.
Other
issues and the laws they triggered:
•The nation's mortgage crisis means lenders in California and Colorado must now
do a better job of evaluating a borrower's ability to repay the loan.
Colorado is also giving delinquent borrowers several more months to get caught
up. New York is requiring a criminal background check for loan officers.
•Environmental and consumer concerns led Illinois to mandate energy-efficient
light bulbs in buildings larger than 1,000 square feet and Minnesota to ban
mercury in everything from new stoves and barometers to over-the-counter
pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and toiletries. Connecticut is expanding a tax break
for fuel-efficient cars.
•Worries about illegal immigration spawned a tough Arizona law that strips a
business of its license for knowingly hiring undocumented workers.
• Same-sex unions are now extended to couples in New Hampshire, and Oregon has
new domestic partnership procedures for same-sex couples.
More states are curbing smoking and limiting new technology.
Illinois is banning smoking in public areas, and California is making it illegal
to smoke in a car if a minor is inside.
Drivers younger than 18 cannot use a cellphone in Oregon. And in Washington,
text messaging behind the wheel is now illegal.
"Any distraction is a bad distraction, but texting in particular," says Bob
Calkins, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol.
"Nobody is that good a driver that they can have their eyes down looking at a
PDA and not looking at the road."
Contributing: The Associated Press
31 states introducing new laws, UT, 1.1.2008,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-01-new-laws_N.htm
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