Meet Tremaine Leigh, Another Face of Revolving-Door Justice in Atlanta

 

Fulton County Sheriff's Office 

By Nicholas Stix

On March 31, Tremaine Leigh shot and almost killed West Georgia University student Brandon Griffith, 21, and robbed Griffith of his money and his car. Leigh had no business being on the street free.

But that’s an old story in Atlanta. When racist mass murderer Brian Nichols went on his bloody killing spree on March 11, 2005, he was a prisoner being retried in Fulton County Court for kidnapping, raping, and sodomizing his ex-girlfriend.

Although Nichols was found to be in the possession of ten pounds of marijuana and two assault weapons when he was initially arrested, he was tried for rape, sodomy, and kidnapping, but not for weapons or drug offenses. Perhaps due to Fulton County DA Paul Howard’s twin biases in favor of black felons and black athletes, the jury never heard about the weapons or the drugs, and Howard’s incompetent, lazy ADAs provided them with little corroborating evidence, even though they had access to massive amounts of evidence. That caused an open-and-shut case of kidnapping, rape, sodomy, weapons and drug offenses to deteriorate into an exercise in “he said, she said.” As a result, the jury almost acquitted Nichols, deadlocking with eight jurors out of twelve voting to acquit.

It was during Nichols’ 2005 retrial that he beat little grandmother-jailer Cynthia Hall almost to death, disarmed her, and went on the racist rampage in which he murdered four people, and carjacked, kidnapped, and wounded several others.

(Nichols left Deputy Hall with “severe and permanent brain damage.”)

Had Howard’s ADAs done their jobs in the first trial, Nichols would have been convicted, and thus unable to kill any of his four murder victims, maim Deputy Hall, or harm any of the other people whose paths he crossed in March, 2005.
 

Atlanta: A Felons’ Paradise

When Nichols was arrested following his mass murder spree, he claimed that criminal justice is a case of “systematic slavery” against black men. In reality, Atlanta is closer to paradise for the city’s predominantly black felons, though not for their majority-black victims. In recent years, tens of thousands of crimes have gone unprosecuted due to “lost” 911 calls, “disappeared” crimes by police, and incompetence and preferential treatment given certain classes of suspects (athletes and clergymen) by DA Paul Howard.

Days after Nichols’ murder spree, Denise A. Sorino, who worked in Howard’s office for three years, and who supports the movement to have him recalled, told me that in 1999, she and her colleagues were working on thousands of cases going back as far as 1994, all of which were dropped, and thousands of which never even reached the indictment stage.

There are over 80 ADAs, and each one of them has over 100 cases to plea and arraign…. This is a guess, but 90 percent of these indictments, each of these defendants had more than one page of priors, and it was incredible that half of these people were still walking out on the street.

Why the backlog? When Howard was elected DA in 1996, most of the DA’s staff consisted of experienced, white attorneys. According to Sorino, who is white, Howard fired most of the whites, and replaced them with blacks who were inexperienced, and often incompetent.

Other critics of Howard have made the same charge, though in more circumspect language. Local white talk show host and former Atlanta Journal Constitution writer Dick Williams says, for instance, that “the District Attorney’s Office under Paul Howard has fallen apart, ‘cause he replaced all the old guys and brought in his people.”

In the current case of Tremaine Leigh,

Leigh has been in and out of the Fulton County Jail since 2005, records show. Charges have included drug possession, armed robbery, kidnapping, hit-and-run, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Long before trying to kill Brandon Griffith, Tremaine Leigh was a serious bad guy. And we can only imagine what delights are to be found in his sealed juvi record!

If he was convicted on the armed robbery charge alone, he should have gotten 10 years; if he went down for the kidnapping, he should have gotten anywhere from 20 to life, depending on the aggravating factors (weapon used, how he otherwise treated his victim, etc.), and where the crime stood chronologically in Leigh’s crime parade.

Was he convicted of any of those many previous felony charges? Did he get probation, instead of prison time? Didn’t DA Paul Howard care? Didn’t the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution care enough to find out, or to highlight DA Howard’s tradition of revolving-door justice, and the unnecessary victims it spawns?

Those were all rhetorical questions.

 
Criminal Justice System Indifference is Matched by Media Indifference

All I could find on Leigh’s conviction was one brief AJC news story that follows below, and one blog item recounting said news story. That’s it.

DA Paul Howard is a corrupt, incompetent, racial socialist black Democrat, and the AJC, though white-owned, is a racial socialist Democratic rag. They’re a match!

* * *Man who shot University of West Georgia student gets life
By Christopher Seward
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An Atlanta man who shot a University of West Georgia student in the chest while the victim shoppedat [sic] a Texaco gas station on Northside Drive last year has been sentenced to life without parole plus 35 years. [N.S.: Pay no mind to the official sentence; Leigh will likely be paroled 10-20 years down the road.]

A Fulton County judge sentenced Tremaine Leigh of Atlanta to life without parole plus 35 years for shooting a West Georgia University student at a gas station on Northside Drive.

After shooting Brandon Griffith, 21, on March 31, Tremaine Leigh chased the student around the store as the victim gasped for air, according to a news release from the Fulton County District Attorney's Office.

Prosecutors say Griffith had entered the store to buy snacks but soon was confronted by a gunman. Leigh shot Griffith when he didn’t move quickly enough.

Leigh stole Griffith’s wallet and cell phone, then his car. U.S. Marshals captured the suspect in May.

Leigh has been in and out of the Fulton County Jail since 2005, records show. Charges have included drug possession, armed robbery, kidnapping, hit-and-run, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

A Fulton County jury on Thursday convicted Leigh of armed robbery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, theft by taking and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. Superior Court Judge Kelly Amanda Lee handed down Leigh's sentence.

Previously, at WEJB/NSU:

“Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills… Again”;

“A Veteran Prosecutor Blows the Whistle on How Fulton County DA Paul Howard’s Racism and Corruption Facilitated the Brian Nichols Massacre in Atlanta”;

“The Atlanta Child Murders Case: Convicted Killer Wayne Williams Takes a Polygraph Test” ;

“The Georgia NAACP: We Love Raceless Carjackers!” ;

“As Atlanta’s Super Star Educators Get Hired Away Across the Country, the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal Follows Them.”]