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