Sept. 19 INDIANA: Man who killed ex-wife while on furlough seeks clemency----Attorneys for death row inmate say their client is mentally ill, want the governor to spare his life. Alan Matheney, one of the most notorious killers on Indiana's death Row, will appear before the Indiana Parole Board today seeking mercy for beating his ex-wife to death with a rifle butt while out of prison on an 8-hour pass. Attorneys for Matheney want Gov. Mitch Daniels, who spared the life of mentally ill killer Arthur P. Baird II, to do the same for their client. Matheney, 54, was found guilty in 1990 of killing Lisa Marie Bianco, Mishawaka, while on furlough from the Correctional Industrial Facility near Pendleton, where he was serving a 7-year sentence for beating her and trying to abduct their 2 daughters. Bianco, 29, had been program director for the Elkhart Women's Shelter. Last month, the Indiana Supreme Court ordered Matheney put to death by lethal injection Sept. 28 in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. Matheney wasn't supposed to leave the Indianapolis area during the 1989 furlough, but he drove north to Bianco's home in Mishawaka. He burst into Bianco's home, caught her as she tried to run away and struck her in the head so hard with a shotgun that the weapon broke. A Lake County jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. Matheney's attorneys say he is seriously mentally ill and psychotic, still harboring the delusion that drove him to kill Bianco. Matheney told police he was at the center of a conspiracy involving the CIA and organized crime. Mental health experts have testified Matheney is delusional, believing Bianco was having an affair with a local prosecutor and the pair were conspiring to keep him in prison for life. (source: Indianapolis Star) FLORIDA: Trial in triple slaying to begin----Odyssey took suspect to Mexico, Kentucky before his capture For more than a year, it seemed like Chip Carter -- wanted in a Jacksonville triple homicide -- would never be caught. Even when authorities got close, he seemed to elude their grasp. Like the time he swam across the Rio Grande to escape U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas. Or the time Mexican police set him free without telling the Americans. But Carter eventually was captured last year, 1,000 miles from the Mexican border town where he was last seen. And today he goes on trial in the 2002 shooting deaths of his former girlfriend, Elizabeth Smith Reed, 35; her 16-year-old daughter, Courtney Smith; and Glenn Pafford, 49, a friend of Reed's. Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda said he will seek death sentences for Carter, 51, if he is convicted of 1st-degree murder. Carter's public defenders had pursued an antidepressant overdose defense early in the case but appear to have backed off that theory. They wouldn't discuss the defense strategy. Reed, Smith and Pafford were gunned down in Reed's Arlington home just after midnight July 24, 2002. Police said Carter was upset over his breakup with Reed and shot her twice and Pafford 3 times before turning his .22-caliber rifle on Smith. She was shot once and died in the hospital 2 days later. There was another person in the home that night. Reed's 14-year-old son, Rick, came out of a back bedroom after hearing screams and gunshots, saw the bodies and dialed 911. But the assailant had disappeared into the night. Two weeks later, Border Patrol agents spotted Carter's truck in Escobares, Texas. Upon seeing them, Carter and a Mexican national dove into the Rio Grande and swam across. When they got to the other side, Mexican soldiers were waiting, and Carter's number appeared to be up. He was arrested near Ciudad Miguel Aleman after the soldiers found 2 handguns on him, and his Mexican companion said Carter ditched a rifle in the river. U.S. investigators retrieved the weapon and matched it to the gun used in the Jacksonville slayings, police said. With Carter jailed in Mexico, Jacksonville police thought it would just be a matter of waiting until Mexican authorities were through with him on the weapons charges. But in December 2002, he paid $1,000, walked out of jail, hopped on a motorcycle police said his brother brought him and rode off into the sunset. For more than a year, U.S. authorities haggled with Mexican officials for help in finding Carter. The Mexicans were reluctant to cooperate because Carter faced a possible death sentence in the United States. In October 2003, State Attorney Harry Shorstein of Jacksonville corresponded with the Mexican consulate in Orlando and "reluctantly" agreed not to seek the death penalty if Mexico would help find Carter. Anything to get him back. But unbeknownst to authorities, Carter was long gone from Mexico. He was living near Paducah, Ky., and working as a roofer named Rodney Vonthun. On New Year's Day 2004, he was arrested in a Paducah bar and charged with public drunkenness and giving false information to police. He was released from jail the next day, but not before a Kentucky state trooper who had been at the bar noticed his picture on an FBI most-wanted poster in another town. Kentucky authorities scrambled to relocate Carter, and this time his luck ran out. Carter's employer told police where he lived, and they arrested him in a mobile home park as he got ready for work. His identity was confirmed through fingerprints. Jury selection is scheduled to begin this morning. Circuit Judge Lance Day will allow jurors to hear most of the evidence about Carter's travels after the slayings, but Public Defender Bill White successfully argued that the handguns seized from Carter by Mexican soldiers are irrelevant. "There's no indication in this case that any weapons were used at any other time," White said. Carter, who had shoulder-length hair when he was arrested, appeared in court Friday with a short-cropped haircut in preparation for trial. The trial is expected to last the rest of this week and part of next. Because Carter wasn't arrested in Mexico, Shorstein's death penalty deal with Mexican authorities is off. If Carter is convicted of 1st-degree murder, jurors would return later in the month to recommend to Day whether Carter should live or die. (source: The Times-Union) OHIO: Trimble case's size poses risk, say law experts----Task of weighing 21 counts against suspect may frustrate jury, they say The trial of Brimfield Township triple murder defendant James E. Trimble begins Monday with prosecutors seemingly in the strongest position possible in a death penalty case. They have Trimble exactly where they want him: in custody at the Portage County Jail, where he has remained since his alleged shooting rampage on that night in January. And they have so much ballistic and forensic evidence to use against him that they offered only token resistance to a defense motion for a 2nd trial -- a case charging the 45-year-old with illegal possession of a small arsenal of firearms. Yet leading criminal justice experts say there are significant risks to Portage County Prosecutor Victor V. Vigluicci's trial strategy. He has chosen to present evidence and witness testimony to prove 21 counts of a 22-count indictment, the sheer magnitude of which could extend the trial well into November. The task of absorbing that much evidence from so many witnesses, according to the experts, could alienate the jury in the face of what this case is all about: 3 death penalty specifications. Dangers of strategy Geoffrey S. Mearns, the new dean of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law -- and a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Oklahoma City bombing case -- said there are dangers with such a strategy. "You prolong the trial, and from a tactical standpoint you run the risk that the jury becomes impatient, becomes frustrated," Mearns said. "Any time you introduce a new episode or a new charge, it can present an opportunity for the defense to demonstrate that a particular witness is not credible. "Sometimes -- but not often -- a defense counsel can exploit one of those opportunities and then be able to argue to the jury that the whole case is lacking in credibility." Mearns likened the scenario to cooking a stew. "They can say: 'Ladies and gentlemen, a trial is like a soup or a stew. If one ingredient in that stew is sausage and that sausage is rotten, even though that was the only ingredient that was rotten, you sure as hell don't want to eat any of the stew,'" he said. Additional charges Trimble has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the alleged shooting deaths of his girlfriend, Renee L. Bauer, 42, and her 7-year-old son, Dakota, on the night of Jan. 21 at his home on Sandy Lake Road; and the death of Sarah A. Positano, 22, whom he had allegedly taken hostage later in a nightlong episode as dozens of state and local law enforcement officers converged at her Ranfield Road apartment in a heavily wooded area of Brimfield Township. For those alleged offenses, Trimble was charged with three counts of aggravated murder. If convicted of any one, he could be sentenced to death. But the prosecution also chose to proceed at this trial with 12 counts of attempted murder in connection with allegations Trimble fired at officers pursuing him after the Sandy Lake Road shootings; 3 counts of kidnapping; 2 counts of felonious assault; and 1 count of aggravated burglary for the alleged break-in at Positano's apartment. 2 of the 3 kidnapping charges and both felonious assault charges pertain to a woman and her son who allegedly were threatened by Trimble at their home in the woods between the 2 shooting incidents. The other kidnapping charge pertains to the hours Positano was held hostage before Trimble allegedly shot her. Trimble's chief defense lawyer, Portage County Public Defender Dennis Day Lager, succeeded in getting the firearms charges -- investigators reported finding 21 firearms -- set aside for a separate trial. Noted Akron defense lawyer Tom Adgate said the best thing Lager has going for him is "the prosecutor filing all these superfluous charges. The only reason they can keep this guy alive is if the jury's mad at the prosecutor," Adgate said. "How else would you offend the jury?" According to Adgate, jurors could become offended if they feel the state is wasting their time on additional charges. "And there's only one person to take it out on -- the state," Adgate said. "Most good prosecutors, I think, stick to just the essentials -- what the case is really about." More not always good Mearns said he learned invaluable lessons as a federal prosecutor in New York from the so-called "Pizza Connection" mobster cases of the 1980s. In those trials -- based on a $1.65 billion heroin and cocaine ring with mob connections stretching from Sicily to Brooklyn to Brazil and eventually a chain of pizza parlors -- nearly 2 dozen mobsters were accused. The trials took 17 months to present, which at the time was termed the longest such episode in U.S. history. "The 'Pizza Connection' trials," Mearns said, "were really these huge circuses where they'd have 20 defendants. It was always the standard view to bring them all in together, throw everything in, and there were a couple of major, stunning acquittals in those situations." An emerging view among some prosecutors is that more charges are not necessarily better, he said, "because of the risk that a particular witness could screw up and compromise the whole case and that the jury will become frustrated with the prosecution." "When I was a prosecutor," Mearns said, "instead of the scattershot (strategy) of throwing everything up at the wall, we would try to do rifle shots. We'd do trials of 2 or 3 people, with 4 charges, and those trials would take 2 weeks instead of one big mega-trial." Adgate said there is another factor worthy of consideration in Vigluicci's decision to try so many charges. "He's still a politician, and every day this trial goes on, his name is in the paper. People don't always get that," Adgate said, "but that's oftentimes the motivating factor for prosecutors. He gets to dance longer in the sun. All you have to do is try this case on the three murders and be done with it." Judge John A. Enlow granted a motion by Vigluicci on Feb. 3, 10 days after Trimble's arrest, which prohibited both sides from commenting on the case outside of court. (source: Beacon Journal)
