Feb. 23
TEXAS:
Murder suspect denies telling lies
Despite apparent inconsistencies in statements to police and in court
testimony, an immigrant from Kazakhstan charged with capital murder denied
she is a liar Tuesday under cross-examination by a prosecutor.
If convicted, Asel Abdygapparova, a 30-year-old mother of 2, faces either
life in prison or the death penalty.
"You do lie, don't you?" asked lead prosecutor Robert McClure.
"No," Abdygapparova replied.
"You did to Sgt. Kellogg," McClure retorted.
"Some of the things wasn't true," the defendant answered in broken
English, referring to her initial statement to homicide detectives after
she came forward and led police to the victim's buried body.
That line of questioning set the tone for what seemed like an
excruciatingly long day on the witness stand for Abdygapparova and
included a rare contempt-of-court citation issued by 175th District Judge
Mary Roman against lead defense counsel Carolyn M. Wentland.
Abdygapparova was called to the witness stand on Friday. She told jurors
she was "numb" with fear on the night of March 31, 2001, when Rosa Maria
Rosado was abducted from a bus stop, raped and strangled in a cheap West
Side motel room by two of the defendant's companions.
Abdygapparova's boyfriend at the time, Ramon Hernandez, and his friend
Santos Minjares both have been convicted in the killing and are on death
row.
On Friday, Abdygapparova testified she herself was a rape victim and a
battered woman. She admitted she paid for the motel room with the victim's
money and subsequently left the room twice, once to buy a shovel and once
to get bleach used to clean up the crime scene.
On Tuesday, McClure hammered her with questions.
"You knew it was wrong when she was abducted? You knew it was wrong when
she was raped? You knew it was wrong what happened in that motel room?" he
asked.
To each query, she replied, "Yes." But when asked whether she chose to
help Hernandez, she responded, "No."
"You could have written, 'Help! Call police,' on the motel registration
card," McClure said.
"As I think of it now, yes, I could," the defendant admitted.
Abdygapparova said that, when she went to buy the shovel, she thought at
that time that a life might be taken.
Several times during the day, testimony was interrupted when the
quarreling attorneys for the prosecution and defense forced the judge to
order the jury out of the courtroom.
At one point, after being admonished at least twice by the judge, Wentland
was cited for contempt for "making a face" after the judge failed to
sustain an objection. Wentland continued to argue with the judge and was
cited again for "arguing with the court."
Each time, Roman fined Wentland $500. The attorney was ordered to bring in
a check made out to the Battered Women's Shelter this morning.
(source: San Antonio Express-News)
************************
Thomas describes slayings
[Editor's note: This article contains graphic details. Reader discretion
is advised]
After listening to an hour-long, audiotaped confession in which Andre
Thomas described killing 3 people, the jurors who will decide his fate
were given a break.
Thomas faces 3 counts of capital murder in the deaths of his estranged
wife Laura Boren Thomas, their son, Andre Boren and her daughter Leyha
Hughes. The trial going on this week concerns the death of Leyha Hughes.
After prosecutors rested their case, Judge James Fry told the jury that
defense attorneys Bobbie Peterson and R.J. Hagood were not expecting to
have to present their witnesses until Friday. Fry said the defense could
probably get some witnesses ready for the later part of this week, but he
would prefer to spend the time working on some procedural matters that
must be completed before the jury can begin to deliberate.
With that explanation, Fry dismissed the jury until Monday morning.
Although the morning's session was short, it was intense. Jurors spent a
little more than hour listening to Thomas explain the actions that left
three people dead at his hands.
On Monday, jurors watched a videotaped statement in which Thomas talked
about the crimes. However, the taped conversation included greater details
as Thomas attempted to explain what he was thinking as he broke into his
wife's apartment on March 27.
Sherman Police Detective Mike Ditto, Texas Ranger Tony Bennie, and Grayson
County Jail Nurse Natalie Sims were involved in the conversation jurors
heard Tuesday. The conversation, Ditto said, came about because Thomas
told Sims he wanted to talk to Ditto. Ditto called the police department
and Ditto and Bennie went to the Grayson County Jail.
After reading Thomas his rights again ,Ditto asked Thomas what he wanted
to talk about. At that point, Thomas started telling them what had
happened the night before the killings and on the day of the crime.
All during the tape, Thomas' voice ranged from calm and quiet to excited
or upset. He seemed to become the most upset when talking about his
inability to understand what was going on around him.
Most of what the jurors heard on the tape had already been presented
through other witnesses or on the videotape.
One major difference was the fact that in the audio statement, Thomas said
he had actually gone to his estranged wife's apartment the night before
the killings to do her harm.
Jurors had already heard from a number of witnesses who said Thomas went
to the apartment on Taylor Street on the night before the Saturday
killings.
Bryant Hughes, Leyha's father, said Thomas sat around the apartment
listening to a taped sermon and then left when Hughes offered him a ride
home.
In the taped statement jurors heard Friday, Thomas said he had planned to
do more than listen to tapes.
"I was gonna do it that night. ... I had it in my mind to. I went in the
kitchen, in fact, and I grabbed a knife. They only had like a little bitty
knife," Thomas told Ditto.
"So the reason you didn't do it that night is because you didn't have a
big enough knife or what?" Ditto asked.
"No, not only that but ... I had ... when I thought about it, I went back
in there and I sat down on the couch. He (Bryant Hughes) had grabbed an
extension cord and wrapped it around like he was getting ready, like he
was just gonna strangle one of `em. And then I was, that's how I was
interpreting it. He looked like he was scared, like he couldn't, like he
couldn't move unless I made the first move," Thomas said.
He explained that the tapes the two men were listening to then distracted
him. Thomas said while he listened to the tapes, his 4-year-old son, Andre
Boren, kept trying to interrupt.
"My son kept on trying to talk to me while I am trying to listen to this
tape and I thought, I was like, 'Hey, I'm tryin' to get educated,'" Thomas
said.
He added that Hughes even told the little boy to stop distracting them
because they were "listening to the word of God."
"The harder I tried to listen, the harder he tried to distract me and
tried to talk to me and I was like `man, it's almost like he don't want me
to get educated on the subject, like ... its almost like he didn't want me
to get educated on the subject. ... I figured, you know, he's the
anti-christ or something maybe he's disguised his appearance or something
you know, to look like, you know, a little 4-year-old boy to where I
couldn't differentiate who it was. My wife, she ... she kept acting
nervous and then more I listened, the more nervous she got, so I figured
she had to be Jezebel cause she was scared," Thomas said.
He said his feeling that Hughes knew what he was planning was reinforced
the next day when he saw Hughes on the way to the apartment.
Thomas said Hughes just threw up his hands when he saw Thomas, "like he
knew what I was fixing to go do, like that's what he wanted me to go do.
And, he was just like, like you know what you gotta go do and I had three
knives in my pocket and I went."
Thomas said when he got the apartment, he kicked open the door and met
Mrs. Thomas in the living room. He said she yelled "no," as he approached
her.
"And I grabbed her and I said, `You.' And, uh, I stabbed her in the heart
and, uh, she fell down and started bleeding on the floor and then, uh, I
jabbed the knife into her chest again and I ripped her chest open, and,
uh, reached down inside of there and I ripped out her heart."
Thomas said he then "ran" back into the children's room and attacked them.
"I stuffed their hearts in my pocket and then I started to stab myself 3
times in the chest," Thomas said.
Thomas said he couldn't believe that the wounds didn't cause him to fall
to the ground like Mrs. Thomas did.
"She started bleeding right away and I noticed that when she was still
bleeding, she was still breathing, even after I ripped out her heart,
which I thought was kinda strange," Thomas said in a voice that started to
sound more excited as he continued to talk about the killings.
"I put their hearts in my pocket and the knives. I got the knives," Thomas
said. He then told the detectives about leaving the apartment and making
his way back to his house.
He said he considered throwing away the hearts as he walked because he
didn't like having them.
"I had it in my mind to throw their hearts away," Thomas said. "But I am
not that heartless." he added. He said he took the hearts back to his
house and put them in a plastic sack before putting them in the trash.
Prosecutors contend that Thomas' actions after the killings prove that he
knew what he was doing was wrong. They say he left the scene in a hurry
and took a route that he thought wouldn't cause him to run into the police
that were rushing to the scene.
Hagood pointed out that if his client had been worried about being caught
doing something wrong, he had plenty of opportunity on the way home to
throw away the evidence. He could have, Hagood said, thrown away the
knives and the hearts and gotten rid of the clothes. But, he didn't. He
left all of those things in his trailer, Hagood said.
When the defense begins its case, it will be their job to prove that
Thomas suffered from a mental illness when the crimes happened and didn't
know right from wrong.
(source: The Herald Democrat)
*******************************
Overcoming Addiction, Prison to Return to Practice (part 2)
[Editor's note: The following is the second of two articles profiling one
lawyer's battle with addiction. The 1st article appeared in the Feb. 14
issue of Texas Lawyer]
Keith Jagmin thought he had stumbled on the elixir of life when he began
taking hydrocodone for his back pain in January 1991. He knew his aching
back was just an excuse to get the drug so he could numb himself into
oblivion and forget about the anguish of losing the biggest case of his
career.
Only weeks before, a Dallas jury had found his client, Ricky Morrow,
guilty of capital murder. With his client's death sentence, Jagmin felt as
though a piece of him had died. For two years, Jagmin, then a respected
Dallas criminal-defense attorney, had been consumed by the case. And yet,
despite all of his exhaustive efforts, he couldn't save his client.
No matter that Morrow was a career criminal who had committed a senseless
murder; Jagmin genuinely believed he had a shot at winning a life sentence
for his client. But when he lost, he didn't just feel bad about it. He
felt bad about himself.
"I had failed to prove my worth as a lawyer," Jagmin says. "I had told
other lawyers at the courthouse and around the office that I was going to
win this case. Humility was not part of my character back then, but
humiliation was."
His wife offered him little solace, telling him on the night of the
verdict that he had abandoned his family for a convicted killer, says
Jagmin, and she would never be able to forgive him. Severely depressed, he
began looking for ways to make the pain of abject failure go away.
"If you hold yourself responsible for the result of litigation, rather
than the process, your life is going to be way out of whack," says Dallas
attorney and social worker Mary Greiner. "If you feel like you are
responsible for saving other people, you will need something to deal with
the despair when you can't control the outcome. That something could well
be drugs."
Jagmin had once taken hydrocodone for a sinus infection and liked the way
it made him feel. The pain pills might make some people drowsy, but it
energized him, making him "glib and unafraid," he says. "If the normal
dosage for Vicodin [hydrocodone] is 10 milligrams taken every four to six
hours as needed for pain, I would take 150 milligrams six times a day," he
says.
To gain access to the drug, he manipulated the three physicians who were
involved in treating his degenerative disk condition. "It's amazing what
you can get when you drop a gold bar card in front of someone," Jagmin
says.
Although the pills made him more disagreeable, he says he could function
as a lawyer just fine. He claims he tried some of his best cases while
high. Then-Dallas District Judge Richard Mays, who had appointed Jagmin to
represent Morrow at trial, reappointed him to represent Morrow on appeal.
Despite his drug use, Jagmin approached the task with the same degree of
perfection and compulsivity that he did Morrow's trial. He filed four
briefs totaling 531 pages and raised 140 points of error. But in 1995, the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction in Morrow v.
State, which only compounded Jagmin's sense of failure.
Ironically, the case raised Jagmin's legal stature, and he became a
death-penalty specialist, authoring "Capital Murder Defense Manual," which
the State Bar of Texas' Criminal Defense Lawyers Project published in
1992. In the acknowledgments, Jagmin dedicated the book to his wife and
recited the telling effects that the Morrow case had on his life.
Once embroiled in the pit of a capital defense, many a good lawyer has
seen his world crumble around him, his heart and soul given up to the
salvation of his client, while that same dedication tears at the hearts of
those closest and dearest to him. Through the dark fog of mortal combat
and the countless days that followed . . . [my wife] was a beacon of light
and love. Despite the insanity of my obsession, she was always there.
That is, until she left him.
On Nov. 18, 1993, after a trip to San Antonio, she came home, he says, and
told him their marriage was over.
Crack in the Armor
Divorced in April 1994, Jagmin and his wife agreed to split custody of
their children: He would be sole managing conservator of their oldest son,
who was then 11. She would be sole managing conservator of the twins, who
were 8. Jagmin didn't want the divorce, and he grew even more depressed
several weeks later, he says, when he learned that his ex-wife was
remarrying. Worse still, she informed Jagmin that she and the twins would
be moving with her new husband to Wyoming. Jagmin says he went ballistic,
filing a motion to modify their custody arrangement and requesting that
all of his children remain with him.
A visiting judge in the 255th Judicial District Court in Dallas precluded
Jagmin's ex-wife from removing the twins from Dallas County, Jagmin says.
Although he never had formal custody of the twins, when his ex-wife moved,
the twins remained with him -- that is, until he turned to crack-cocaine.
Between feeling as though he had failed his wife and Morrow, he says his
drug of choice, hydrocodone, was not getting him as numb as he needed. He
complained to his housekeeper that his painkillers weren't killing the
pain anymore. When she suggested he try crack, he didn't wince, giving her
$200 to purchase an 8 ball (1/8 of an ounce) from a nearby dealer.
Having defended many crack users, Jagmin knew how addictive the narcotic
was. "But I was a smart lawyer. I figured I could control anything," he
says.
The first day he smoked crack was the last day he went to court for 15
months. When court coordinators phoned him about missing docket calls, he
would tell them his doctors had confined him to bed before his back
surgery, which they seemed to be continually rescheduling. The excuse, of
course, didn't hold. Three judges issued writs of attachment, he says,
directing federal marshals to bring him to court.
Because his behavior was so removed from the perfectionist lawyer who so
meticulously handled his docket, an anonymous attorney made a confidential
referral to the State Bar's Texas Lawyers' Assistance Program (TLAP). In
turn, staffers with TLAP phoned Jeff Smith, a Dallas solo who now is
statewide president of Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers (LCL), a support
group for impaired attorneys and law students.
"I made a 12-step call at his house," says Smith, who is a lawyer in
recovery. "Keith admitted he had a problem but gave the standard addict
answer to a 12-step call: "I don't need your help. I can deal with it.'"
But crack was destroying Jagmin, who filed for bankruptcy as he spent
$15,000 to $30,000 a month on his new habit. His house was posted for
foreclosure. Five clients filed grievances against him for legal services
paid for but not rendered. And closing in fast was the District 6
Grievance Committee whose certified letters he completely ignored.
In recovery parlance, he still hadn't hit bottom, he says. "I blamed my
clients, the grievance committee, anyone who interfered with my high."
Worst of all, he says he neglected his children, who didn't comprehend
what was happening to their father. "After 6 months of seeing dad kill
himself, my daughter moved back with her mother," Jagmin says. Her twin
brother shortly followed, but Jagmin's eldest son refused to leave. "He
would have stayed until the bitter end."
And did.
Judicial Intervention
In March 1995, John Creuzot, judge of Criminal District Court No. 4 in
Dallas County, summoned Jagmin to his chambers. Creuzot also was a former
classmate of Jagmin's at SMU law school.
"I was getting complaints from his clients in my courtroom," Creuzot says.
"His voice mail was always full. He never showed up for anything. There
was a lot of behavior that was consistent with addiction."
Creuzot ordered Jagmin to meet with John McShane, then a partner in
Dallas' McShane, Davis & Hance and one of the founders of LCL. At the
meeting in McShane's office, Smith also was there. Jagmin agreed to start
attending LCL meetings, Smith recalls, but his heart wasn't in it. "You
got the sense that he was just trying to get the heat off."
Jagmin attended a few meetings, but it took another 7 months before Jagmin
got clean -- the 1st time.
On Nov. 23, 1995, a so-called friend loaned him $200 so he could buy some
crack. "I couldn't imagine a way out of my problem other than by taking
myself out by overdosing," he says. When he didn't die, he phoned Smith,
and, for the 1st time, he says, he attended a 12-step meeting in earnest.
On Dec. 5, 1995, Jagmin entered into an agreed judgment with the grievance
committee. The committee suspended his license for 90 days, followed by a
three-year probated suspension. The probation was conditioned on Jagmin
passing random drug tests and attending 12-step recovery meetings. Smith,
then-chairman of the Dallas grievance committee, signed the suspension
order and agreed to become Jagmin's 12-step sponsor.
Jagmin quickly learned how to talk the talk of recovery, even though he
says he had "huge doubts about anything spiritual." He led a 12-step
meeting, where he met a woman named Susan. Wooing her with his recovery
lingo, their attraction was immediate. Trouble was, she was married -- and
she shared Jagmin's same weakness for hydrocodone. But that didn't concern
Jagmin.
"Saving Susan was going to make me finally feel all right with myself,"
Jagmin says. "And that began my two-and-a-half year relapse."
Susan moved into Jagmin's home after the Dallas police charged her with
obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, a third-degree felony. "She was
an experienced forger," Jagmin says. To support their mutual addiction,
she taught Jagmin how to become a "phone-in forger," he says. Pretending
to be a doctor, he would call in patient prescriptions for Lortab and
Vicodin.
Maybe it was the nervousness in his voice that alerted a pharmacist. But
in September 1997, Plano police arrested Jagmin for obtaining a controlled
substance by fraud. And in January 1998, the Dallas County Sheriff's
Office executed a warrant for his arrest for two more prescription fraud
cases.
On Jan. 20, 1998, after posting bond, Jagmin filed a Motion for Acceptance
of Resignation as Attorney. "A Bar investigator told me he needed me to
take a urinalysis as a condition of my suspension," Jagmin says. "I told
him I couldn't pass it and decided to resign. I just didn't want to run
anymore."
Of course, that didn't stop him from using. Despite pleading guilty and
receiving a sentence of seven years' deferred probation from Robert Dry,
judge of the 199th District Court in Collin County, and despite being
prohibited from associating with Susan and promising he would faithfully
attend 12-step meetings, Jagmin was too addicted to pills and to Susan to
give up either.
"There is a phrase we use in recovery," Jagmin says. "'We live to use and
use to live.'"
Two weeks after being placed on probation, police arrested him with Susan
while he was attempting to obtain hydrocodone at a Gainesville hospital.
On Oct. 9, 1998, Dry sentenced Jagmin to six years in the Texas Department
of Criminal Justice.
After the punishment hearing, Jagmin was placed in a separate jail cell,
where he was served with an emergency order modifying the parent-child
relationship. His ex-wife had learned of his incarceration; he had finally
lost custody of his oldest son. Devastated, he says he looked in a mirror,
and for the first time realized he had done this to himself. It wasn't
about blaming his parents or the Bar or his ex-wife or Susan. He created
the problem. The only way to come to terms with his life was to accept
that he was powerless over his addiction, and in the words of every
12-step program he had ever sidestepped, surrender control of his life to
a higher power. In the uncontrollable environment of prison, he had
finally hit bottom.
Clean Time
At the Choice Moore Unit in Bonham, Jagmin realized he could get in more
trouble with the State Bar if he practiced law -- jailhouse or otherwise.
Yet there were advantages to letting the other inmates know that he had
once been a criminal-defense attorney. "Suddenly, I was a protected
person," he says. "But I made it clear that I was not there to write
writs. I would talk to other inmates about their cases and give them the
names of lawyers who might be helpful. There was a service in that." As a
result, he didn't have to worry about getting in fights and had a pristine
prison record.
A lieutenant who supervised Jagmin thought he was being wasted in the
prison laundry and transferred him to the warden's office, where he worked
on his recovery and wrote articles for the prison newspaper. He says his
"Officer of the Month" series made him popular with prison guards.
"Everyone wanted to be officer of the month." And when Jagmin filed a
motion for shock probation, hoping to be released within 180 days of his
sentence, several of those same guards sent letters of support.
On April 1, 1999, Judge Dry placed Jagmin on a 6-year probation, but
rather than turn him loose, he sent Jagmin to Substance Abuse Felony
Punishment (SAFP), an in-prison treatment facility within the Walker Sayle
Unit in Breckenridge.
"The aim of SAFP is to break down your individuality so you can rebuild
it," Jagmin says. At first there is a lot of public humiliation --
standing naked, being yelled at, convincing you to drop your pride and
accept that you are not in control of anything, he says.
Jagmin thrived in SAFP, embracing his recovery rather than resisting it.
His ability to speak in front of large groups also served him well. The
staff asked him to teach a class on chemical dependency, which gave him
greater access to counselors who accelerated his own spiritual growth.
On Feb. 1, 2000, after nine months in SAFP, he was released to a
"transitional therapeutic community," which operated out of the Salvation
Army in Dallas. In prison, all calls were collect, so he chose to write
his children weekly during his 17 months in custody. At the Salvation
Army, he bought a phone card to call his children; he immediately reached
his oldest son, who began to cry as his father apologized for his years of
neglect and drugging.
He says his children and his mother topped a lengthy list of people to
whom he owed amends, and he restored his relationship with all of them.
While living at Salvation Army, he visited Judge Creuzot. "He checked in
with me from time to time," Creuzot says. "I'm so proud of him. The most
telling sign is that his family has accepted him back."
To ease his re-entry into the community, Jagmin was allowed to look for
work. He wanted to do some "legal assisting," a necessary step, he
figured, toward someday regaining his law license. "I want to defend
criminal cases again," he says. "But I will not handle capital cases. For
me, it would be like walking into a crack house."
Granted work passes, he went to the Dallas County Law Library and searched
for lawyers who might need paralegal help. But regaining the trust of a
profession he had betrayed was difficult. "I wanted to help him, but I
moved slowly with Keith," says Dallas solo Larry Mitchell. "We always went
through full disclosure with clients, telling them about his substance
abuse. But he never failed to keep an appointment, and his work was
perfect."
Even after Jagmin interviewed one of Mitchell's clients on death row, it
didn't shake his recovery resolve. And neither did the execution of
Morrow, his former client, who was put to death by lethal injection on
Oct. 20, 2004.
Jagmin had a lot of support. Smith once again agreed to be his 12-step
sponsor, and Jagmin attended LCL meetings religiously. Now it was Jagmin
who made 12-step calls on other lawyers, lecturing to inmates on addiction
in the Dallas County Lew Sterrett Justice Center and at his former SAFP
unit.
On May 5, 2004, Judge Dry discharged Jagmin from probation. Smith says he
later spoke to Dry after he ruled. "He told me Keith's case was the most
satisfying he has ever had as a judge."
Small wonder that Dry, the judge who put Jagmin in prison, agreed to
testify on his behalf after Jagmin filed a petition to be reinstated to
the bar on June 22, 2004. More than 5 years had elapsed since his
resignation, and the disciplinary rules specified that Jagmin was eligible
for reinstatement -- though the issue fell within the discretion of a
district court.
If Judge Charles Stokes, who presided over the case and the 68th Judicial
District Court of Dallas County, felt that Jagmin should not be
reinstated, Jagmin would have to wait another three years before
reapplying. But on Jan. 21, Stokes listened attentively as Dry, McShane
and Smith offered their unequivocal opinions that it was in the best
interests of the bar, the public and the interests of justice that Jagmin
be reinstated.
When Jagmin took the stand, his attorney, Dan Garrigan, asked him what
assurances he could give the judge that he wouldn't relapse. "I have been
clean for 6 1/2 years, and I know what my life was like when society
called me a success," he said. "I refuse to go back to a life that for me
was a living hell."
After closing arguments, Stokes didn't hesitate. "I am going to grant the
petition," he said. "I am familiar with the work of John McShane and Jeff
Smith. I don't think they would set this man up for failure."
Jagmin's supporters -- some of them lawyers in recovery -- burst into
applause, smiling tearfully and hugging each other. Overcome by emotion,
Jagmin couldn't hold back his tears. Only later was he able to reflect on
his feelings.
"Once upon a time, I was Keith the lawyer. Now I am just Keith," he says.
"I hope lawyering will give me some job fulfillment. But I no longer need
it to prove who I am."
(source: Texas Lawyer)
