Over on Point of Law, I have a short piece on the small contribution employment law developments made to Brian Nichols’s escape and resulting murder of three or four people. Michelle Malkin’s readers debate the issue. Certainly, there were other contibuting farcical errors, including a weak prosecution that resulted in a mistrial the first time Nichols’s rape count was tried, the shocking underreaction to Nichols trying to smuggle shanks into the courtroom, nobody monitoring the cameras that showed Nichols overpowering Cynthia Hill, and police overlooking for thirteen hours that a Honda thought to be an escape vehicle was still in the garage where it had supposedly been carjacked.
Rest assured, though, that the Fulton County judicial system appears to have at least as many snafus as its security system:
- Nichols’s public defender in the rape case, Barry Hazen, couldn’t resist not shutting up when given the opportunity to talk to the press, and said a number of things to the press prejudicial to his client about his guilt in the underlying case. A mistrial was perhaps inevitable anyway (though one wonders whether it should be considered unfairly prejudicial when it’s the defendant’s own conduct that causes the prejudice), but Hazen has been pulled off the case.
- Victim Judge Rowland Barnes himself was most famous for the light sentence he gave to celebrity athlete Dany Heatley for a second-degree vehicular homicide plea. (Heatley played a sport called “hockey”, which apparently used to be played professionally in North America.) Barnes was also the judge in the plea bargain of Carisa Ashe, who allegedly beat her five-week-old baby Destiny to death. Two days into the trial, Barnes approved a plea bargain whereby the 34-year-old Ashe would be sentenced to probation if the unmarried mother of seven (others) agreed to a tubal ligation. While there was a dispute within the coroner’s office whether it was a shaken-baby case, there’s something unseemly about the plea deal. If there’s enough evidence to convict the mother, the deal is too light a punishment; if the case was that weak, a state-coerced sterilization smacks of an undesireable import from Chinese law.
- The shutdown of the courthouse postponed the pending murder trial of Michael LeJeune, who in 1997 allegedly shot his friend Ronnie Davis over a $250 drug debt and then dismembered the body in a bathtub. (It took so long to get to trial because of an appeal of an incorrect ruling that kept out evidence of a blood found on a vise in LeJeune’s parents house (where LeJeune allegedly tried to extract the bullet from the victim’s head); that ruling was necessary because previous evidence of blood found in the defendant’s car and apartment had been thrown out. State v. Lejeune, 277 Ga. 749 (2004); State v. Lejeune, 276 Ga. 179, 576 S.E.2d 888 (2003).)
Judge Constance Russell, concerned that the jury would be prejudiced by coverage of the escaped convict, ordered the jury sequestered and cut off from contact from their families–which meant that family members trying to find out if their relatives in the courthouse were okay had (at best) difficulty finding out. After putting jurors through all of that, Judge Russell decided that she was inclined to declare a mistrial anyway, but LeJeune, after changing his mind several times, asked for the trial to proceed. Russell then let LeJeune play “Heads I win, tails don’t count,” and granted his request for a mistrial after his attorney had a chance to cross-examine the state’s star witness, LeJeune’s ex-girlfriend Kelly Anand.
(Steven H. Pollak, “Ga. Legal Community Deals With Courthouse Shootings’ Aftermath”, Fulton County Daily Report, Mar. 15; Beth Warren, “Mistrial declared in rape case against Nichols”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 14; Beth Warren, “Calls, e-mails hammer DA on sterilization case”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 18; AP, Mar. 15; Bill O’Reilly, Feb. 21; Beth Warren, “Details vivid in LeJeune trial”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 9; “Gruesome Testimony in Murder Trial”, WSB-TV, Mar. 9; Beth Warren, “Jurors get Easter wish”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 8).
(Update, March 17: The Fulton County Daily Report has much more detail about the scene in the courtroom. An attorney Nichols had restrained was left in handcuffs by marshals for an hour; the marshals also failed to notify the judge’s wife, who worked down the hall. Nichols’s second gun came from a 60-year-old deputy with a heart condition.)
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