The Knoxville Horror
David in Tennessee’s Vanessa Coleman Trial Journal, Part XI
5/3/2010 12:17:44 A.M. EDT
Here is the latest. Will the journal be admitted? From Judge Baumgartner's previous rulings, I don't see why not.
Note that Jamie Satterfield writes that the case shocked because of its “randomness and brutality.” The word “random” is always used in cases like this, as if it was just a mistake or accident.
[NS, 5/15/10: Ah, yes. The way racist blacks and their white apologists refer to a heinous crime as “a bad decision” or “a mistake.” In the nihilism that “diversity” gives us, there is no “bottom.”]
Judge to decide if journal is admissible in slayings trial
Coleman defense says prosecutors must prove she wrote in it
By Jamie Satterfield
Knoxville News Sentinel
Posted May 2, 2010 at 11:43 p.m.
Torture slaying suspect Vanessa Coleman's fate could rest in the pages of a journal that, so far, has been kept under legal lock and key.
Coleman, 21, faces trial today in a January 2007 crime spree that left Channon Christian, 21, dead inside a trash can and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, executed and burned alongside railroad tracks near the Chipman Street house where they were held captive.
Hers is the fourth trial in a case that sent shock waves throughout East Tennessee because of its randomness and brutality. But this go-around, prosecutors Takisha Fitzgerald and Leland Price have a new weapon in their evidentiary arsenal - a journal they say Coleman penned.
Contents of the journal have been kept from public view. Coleman's defense team of Kentucky attorney Ted Lavit and Knoxville lawyer Russell Greene contend the state first must prove the diary was penned by their client before it can be used against her.
It was found inside a purse authorities seized from a bedroom in Coleman's Lebanon, Ky., hometown, where she and beau Letalvis Cobbins, along with his pal, George Thomas, allegedly hid out in the days following the slayings.
Knox County Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner has said from the bench that the journal is replete with references to the case. It will be up to him to decide if prosecutors can present the contents to a Davidson County jury tapped last week to hear the case after concerns over publicity and local outrage prompted a change in venue.
Prosecutors also plan to present to jurors letters Coleman penned to her parents while behind bars awaiting trial. Those, too, have not yet been made public.
The documents and the legal debate over them ensure that Coleman's trial will not be a carbon copy of the three that preceded it. Nor were those three trials mere duplicates.
Cobbins was the first to be tried. He served up a twist when he opted - against the advice of lead counsel Scott Green - to testify, claiming he succumbed to an offer from Christian of oral sex in return for her freedom. He insisted he was too fearful of brother and convicted ringleader Lemaricus Davidson to follow through with his end of the bargain.
Davidson, on the other hand, contended Christian and Newsom were not innocent victims but instead came willingly to his home to buy drugs. Thomas painted himself as a pot smoker detached from the crimes being committed around him.
In each of those trials, prosecutors turned to the suspects' interrogations with police to deflect their claims. Davidson, who opted for a Knox County jury, was sentenced to die. Cobbins, tried by a different Davidson County panel, was ordered to die behind bars, as was Thomas, whose case was decided by a Hamilton County jury.
Coleman, the lone woman charged in the case and who was 18 at the time of the killings, will face a predominantly female, middle-aged jury.
The key issue, as outlined by opposing counsel during jury selection last week, is Coleman's culpability. Did she provide direct aid to her male counterparts? Did she merely facilitate the crimes by her failure to seek help for the victims? Or was she a victim herself, trapped in a situation from which she saw no escape?
Just as in the other three cases, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Jurors will be sequestered throughout the trial, which is expected to span 10 days.
Jamie Satterfield may be reached at 865-342-6308.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hmmmmmm, how come documents found on "Right-wing extremists" never seem to have to be proven to have been penned by themselves???
Perhaps because in the eyes of predominantly Left-wing prosecutors, even merely having such heretical documents on hand is itself a crime?
In that same POV, there's certainly nothing criminal about a "protected group" asserting its right to hate its oppressor and extract a measure of revenge.
This is the essence of what's been going on in this country for over sixty years! The Left, once funded by the USSR, now entrenched in the UN, the World Bank and the IMF has sought to remake this country over.
It was wise enough to realize that a frontal assault on America's Founders was too risky, so they've insinuated their views and values into our legal and economic system.
You very well might say they've never been closer to achieving their final goals.
"The word 'random' is always used in cases like this, as if it was just a mistake or accident."
Because these horrors couldn't - just couldn't! - be the result of deliberate, conscious, intentional political decisions. Like the decision some decades ago to mix blacks and whites at any price.
Imagine that a Supreme Court, following the theories of its buddies in academia and elsewhere, decreed that Great Apes have rights and that righting the wrongs done to these creatures will be a major priority of society, to be enforced by law. Apes will have to be (eventually) "mainstreamed" in the public school classroom, like retarded kids are now. Judged by a jury of their peers (or by spokespersons for their peers). Great efforts will be have to be made to get them integrated into and comfortable in society, and to get them into pants. You object to a bonobo's dating your daughter? You're HATEFUL! We would see bars on all windows and doors...police patrols 24/7...extraordinarily draconian laws passed, and enforced with terrible brutality (on human and ape alike)...entire cities effectively abandoned by one group and returning to a state of nature...but no one daring to say - not even if his life is at stake - that the Emperor Monkeys are naked. Thank gawd this is fiction, right?
What Nic might not tell you is Jews were the indispensable pushers (though not always the headliners) of the racial "integration" movement, from the NAACP to Brown to the Freedom Riders. The head of the blacks' headless community wears a yarmulke and always has. Such a shame! Write this note to Abe Foxman: "I don't want my daughter to kiss any syphilitic Negro on the testicles" and see how much more interesting your life becomes.
Integration? How is it "integration" deliberately to break up a homogeneous group, and interlard it with incongruous, incompatible elements? Isn't that DISintegration? Why, yes. Yes, I think it is. The Red Diaper babies learned well one of communism's basic tricks: call things their opposite. Disintegration is integration! Self-protection is an attack! Love is hate! Homosexuality is happiness (gay)! Etc.
Disintegrate is what America has done from the early 1960s forward. Is American a more integrated, coherent society now than in 1964? 1994? Hell, 2004?
But remember, this outcome, trees and forest, was random. It wasn't the result of a political decision made by a small group of academics, journalists, and above all judges. As Newsweek will tell you, it was a spontaneous expression of justice by the kids, the inevitable result of unstoppable history. These things happen.
Now attend your diversity training session. OR ELSE.
JMK,
The funny thing is, many professors of criminal justice insist that the criminal justice system is irredeemably racist, and routinely warehouses innocent black men.
I think they feel the need to constantly foist lies of all sizes on the world because: 1. They're afraid that the dark side will otherwise lose momentum, and lose; and 2. Just to keep in practice.
Anon:
Alex, that you?
Post a Comment