Sept. 26 TEXAS: Son held in slayings of mother and sibling -- Sugar Land police say money was the motive in '03 shootings Thomas "Bart" Whitaker has been arrested on a charge of capital murder in the deaths of his mother and brother, who were shot in their home nearly two years ago in an attack police say was motivated by money. Whitaker, 25, was arrested Thursday afternoon in Laredo after federal and Mexican officials found him in Monterrey, Mexico, Sugar Land police said Sunday. Police said Bart Whitaker had hoped to inherit more than $1 million resulting from the deaths of his parents and brother. The alleged plot that resulted in the slayings was not the 1st time Whitaker had planned to kill his family, police said. On at least 2 other occasions, plots to kill his parents and brother fell through, investigators said. Bart Whitaker is the third suspect arrested in the Dec. 10, 2003, attack that took the lives of Patricia Whitaker and her son Kevin. Whitake and his father, Kent, 56, were wounded. Investigators said Bart Whitaker was shot in the arm to make it appear he was a victim. "Hopefully, the recent arrests will bring closure to our community for this heinous crime. Our work in this case will continue until convictions have been obtained for all 3 participants in the murders of Patricia and Kevin Whitaker," Sugar Land Police Chief Steve Griffith said Sunday in a statement. Steven Champagne, 23, was taken into custody Sept. 14 in Camp Pendleton, Calif., Snd Chris Brashear was arrested Sept. 12. Champagne is being held in the San Diego County Jail, and Brashear is in the Fort Bend County Jail. They are being held without bail. Sugar Land police Capt. Gary Cox said police were expected to bring Whitaker to Sugar Land by Sunday night. Whitaker apparently had been living for more than a year in the Mexican city of Cerralvo, where he was working as a laborer, Cox said. Cox said Mexican authorities and FBI agents found Whitaker and handed him over to Sugar Land police in Laredo. Information developed during the investigation led police to Mexico. No other details were available. According to court documents, Brashear was the triggerman in the plan. They said Brashear waited inside the house with a 9 mm pistol for the family to come home and opened fire on the Whitakers when they walked in the door. Investigators said Champagne told police that Brashear and Whitaker acted as if they were wrestling for the weapon and that Whitaker was shot during the staged scuffle, according to court documents. Champagne was parked on another street and drove the getaway car for Brashear. A capital murder charge, which carries the possibility of the death penalty, was filed because state law allows a capital charge if more than 1 victim is killed during the same event. "The possibility of the death penalty is definitely in play in this case," Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey said Sunday. In July 2004, Whitaker left town, saying he feared he would be charged. Patricia Whitaker, 51, and Kevin Whitaker, 19, were dead at the scene from gunshot wounds to the chest on the first floor of the house in the 1100 block of Heron Way. According to information released Sunday by Sugar Land police, Bart Whitaker conspired in December 2000 with two acquaintances from Baylor University, where he was a student, to kill his brother and parents in a plan similar to the one he's accused ofcarrying out. The plan, police said, was aborted when a co-conspirator activated the alarm system on the Whitaker residence when a window was opened. Police think that on April 5, 2001, Whitaker again conspired with 3 acquaintances from Baylor University in another plan to kill his parents and brother. They said details of the plan were reported to the Waco Police Department, which forwarded the information to the Sugar Land police. Sugar Land police contacted the Whitaker family and the family determined the information was not credible and no further police action was taken, police said. (source: Houston Chronicle) MISSOURI----new execution date Execution Date Set For Chain of Rocks Bridge Murderer The State Supreme Court has set October 26th as the execution date for Marlin Gray for his role in the deaths of 2 people at the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River in April of 1991. Gray and 3 other men confronted Julie Kerry, her sister Robin Kerry, and their cousin Thomas Cummins on the bridge. The Kerry sisters were raped and pushed off the bridge about 70 feet below. Cummins was forced to jump into the Mississippi River and managed to swim to shore. About 3 weeks later, Julie Kerry's body was recovered from the river near Caruthersville. Robin Kerry's body was never found. One of Gray's accomplices, Reginald Clemons, is on death row awaiting execution. Antonio Richardson, another of those involved, was sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted, in 2003, to life without parole. A 4th member of the group, Daniel Winfrey, made a deal to avoid the death penalty. (source: Missouri.net) ARKANSAS: Judge orders mental evaluation of death row inmate Dansby A condemned Arkansas man and his lawyers got what they asked for. U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes on Thursday ordered a mental examination for Joe Louis Dansby, who sits on Arkansas' death row for the May 16, 1992, killings of Jeff Lewis, 23, and Malissa Clark, 21, both of Prescott. Dansby's lawyers contend that he is mentally retarded. For 2 years, they have been seeking a mental examination. "The court finds that these matters are ripe for consideration," according to the court order filed in federal district court in Texarkana, Ark., where Dansby's 1st round of federal appeals is being litigated. Dansby, 51, was convicted in Miller County Circuit Court in 1997 of the murders. The 2 victims were found shot to death near a logging road in Nevada County. The couple had failed to return home from an outing the previous night. After exhausting state appeals, Dansby filed appeals in federal court and a federal judge stayed his execution, pending the outcome of the appeals. Dansby's lawyers say their client may be mentally retarded and they have asked the court to order tests to determine his mental condition. The U.S. Supreme Court prohibits the execution of mentally retarded people, saying it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Barnes' decision had been delayed because he was waiting to see how the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would rule on similar cases that would have had an impact on the Dansby case. (source: Texarkana Gazette) USA: The Legacy of Lynching For decades, scholars have sought to answer this bloody question: Why has the murder rate been disproportionally high in the South for more than a century? Some argue it's the weather -- hot, steamy conditions setting tempers on edge and provoking deadly violence. Others blame widespread poverty and illiteracy. Still others fault a so-called southern "code of honor" that requires any slight to be avenged. Now 3 sociologists have found an additional explanation: lynchings. Steven F. Messner of the State University of New York at Albany and his collaborators examined county data from 10 southern states where historically reliable information on vigilante lynchings is available: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. (Some counties where boundaries had changed were aggregated into groups of counties.) This data set, originally collected by other researchers, contained the number of lynchings in each county in each state between 1882 and 1930, a period that scholars call the "era of lynchings." Then they gathered homicide data from the FBI and National Center for Health Statistics for each county covering the period from 1986 to 1995. Based on this information, Messner and his colleagues produced 2 maps. One showed homicides: Those counties with the highest rates were colored black; those with lower rates were shaded gray, while those with the lowest rates were white. The second displayed lynchings, using the same shadings. Counties with the most lynchings were colored black, those with a lower rate were gray and those with the lowest rates were white. A quick glace at the maps revealed a chilling pattern. The dark areas roughly overlapped: the counties with the most lynchings had the highest homicide rates, while counties with fewer lynchings had comparatively fewer murders. The overlap wasn't perfect, but it was apparent even to the naked eye, Messner reported in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review. A more sophisticated statistical analysis confirmed the relationship. Counties with the most lynchings had homicide levels roughly 5 % higher on average than those counties with the fewest lynchings -- a correlation that didn't disappear when the researchers controlled for factors known to influence the murder rate, such as population, poverty, low levels of education, the percentage of young people in the population, the unemployment rate and the percentage of single-parent households. They even developed an elaborate method to account for the code of honor, and found that that the correlation remained strong. Why would a brutal practice that began more than a century ago affect these same areas today? Messner isn't yet sure. "That's the million-dollar question. We see these analyses as the 1st word, not the last." He hopes others will join in searching for the reasons. But Messner is confident that "lynching seems to matter and is relevant to our understanding of contemporary lethal violence" in the South. Is capital punishment the modern equivalent of lynching? Yes, argue three researchers who found that the states that sentenced the most criminals to death also tended to be the ones with the most lynchings in the past. Sociologist David Jacobs of Ohio State University and collaborators Jason T. Carmichael of Ohio State and Stephanie L. Kent of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas found that the number of death sentences for all criminals -- black and white -- was higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was particularly strong when they analyzed only death sentences for black defendants. The sociologists theorize that the death penalty became a legal replacement for the lynchings of the past. They found that the number of death sentences in states with the most lynchings increased as the state's population of African Americans grew larger, suggesting that "current racial threat and past vigilantism largely directed against newly freed slaves jointly contribute to current lethal but legal reactions to racial threat," Jacobs and his colleagues write in a forthcoming issue of the American Sociological Review. (source: Washington Post) *********************** Nation's crime rate stays at low level---Numbers likely don't reflect rising gang violence, one expert says CLOSER LOOK AT CRIME Other highlights of the Justice Department report: -Victims: Blacks, men (except in cases of sexual assaults) and young people victimized most often. -Women: Nearly two-thirds of women knew their attackers, while men were just as likely to be attacked by strangers. -Weapons: In 2004, nearly one-quarter of all violent crimes were committed by an offender armed with a gun, knife or other weapon. -Frequency: The rates of rapes and robberies have dropped by nearly 2/3 since 1993. -Location: The West had the highest property crime rate in 2004 (204 crimes per 1,000 households), while renters were victims more often than homeowners (201 versus 143 crimes per 1,000). City dwellers were far more likely to be victims of property crimes (215 crimes per 1,000) than suburban or rural residents (143 and 134 per 1,000, respectively). The nation's crime rate was unchanged last year, holding at the lowest levels since the government began surveying crime victims in 1973, the Justice Department reported Sunday. Since 1993, violent crime as measured by victim surveys has fallen by 57 % and property crime by 50 %. That included a 9 % drop in violent crime from 2001-02 to 2003-04. The 2004 violent crime rate - assault, sexual assault and armed robbery - was 21.4 victims for every 1,000 people age 12 and older. That amounts to about one violent crime victim for every 47 U.S. residents. By comparison, there were 22.6 violent crime victims per 1,000 people in 2003. The Bureau of Justice Statistics said the difference between the rates in 2003 and 2004 was statistically insignificant. Murder is not counted because the bureau's study is based on statements by crime victims. In a separate report based on preliminary police data, the FBI found a 3.6 % drop between 2003 and 2004 - from 16,500 to 15,910. Chicago was largely responsible for the decrease. The survey put the rate for property crimes of burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft in 2004 at 161 for every 1,000 people, compared with 163 the year before. Explanations have been advanced for decline in violent crime, including the record prison population of more than 2 million people, the addition of 100,000 police officers since the mid-1990s and even a deterrent effect that terrorism might have had on street crime. "Success has 1,000 fathers," said Mark Kleiman, an expert on crime control policy who teaches at UCLA. Kleiman said the victim survey probably does not take sufficient account of widely reported increases in gang violence. The leveling off of the crime rate also should be viewed as disappointing, he said. "My sense is that complacency is not justified. This rate means we're down to about twice the level of crime when I was growing up in the 1950s," he said. The Justice Policy Institute, which advocates alternatives to incarceration, said the report offered good news and further reason to "begin investing in community-based policing and local organizations that succeed in increasing public safety." The National Crime Victimization Survey is based on annual interviews by Census Bureau personnel with about 150,000 people at least 12 years old. The FBI does a separate crime study based on reports it receives from thousands of law enforcement agencies. (source: Associated Press) WASHINGTON (state): State man pins vindication hopes on DNA Ted Bradford kept telling the police that he didn't break into a house and rape a woman. He'd been denying it for hours. But he was hungry and exhausted and wanted to go home, he said recently, so he told the detectives what they wanted to hear and assumed that DNA evidence would show he didn't really do it. Now, after he spent nine years behind bars, 2 University of Washington law students say that's exactly what the evidence shows. New scientific testing has revealed what less advanced techniques couldn't back in 1995: that a trace of male DNA, found in a key place on a mask that the woman's attacker forced her to wear, doesn't match Bradford's. They're asking for a new trial for the Yakima man, who hopes to become the first convicted criminal in Washington to be exonerated through DNA evidence. "Having to live with this on his record is a heavy burden. He deserves the opportunity to clear his name," said Theresa Connor, who's been working on the case with fellow law student Matt Ficcaglia. "Whoever committed this crime is still out there." Though Bradford served his prison time and went free last month, to him it's not over. He wants a new jury to hear about the unidentified DNA. "It just shows what I've been trying to tell everybody since I got locked up," Bradford said. "I just want to clear my name and get on to live a normal life." Yakima County prosecutors, however, say the new results don't show anything clearly. There was DNA from several unknown people found on items from the crime scene, and genetic evidence from at least 2 -- not including the victim -- was on the mask itself. "They're really not conclusively exculpatory, in my opinion," said deputy prosecutor Kevin Eilmes, who plans to argue against having a 2nd trial. He said it's possible that attorneys or jurors handled the mask during Bradford's 1996 trial, leaving behind DNA, or that it has otherwise been exposed to people over the years. But Connor and Ficcaglia say the evidence is key because of where it was found. It was on electrical tape that had been placed over the eyeholes of the mask. The genetic evidence -- possibly skin cells -- was on the sticky side of the tape, where it adhered to the mask and likely would have been protected against contamination. In a sworn declaration, Philip Hodge, a forensic scientist for the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, said the unidentified DNA presumably came from whoever placed the tape on the mask. The two third-year law students started working on the case as part of the Innocence Project Northwest Clinic, a program led by professor Jackie McMurtrie at the university's School of Law. They helped investigate it, inheriting it from 2 previous students, and wrote the appeal that was recently filed with the state Court of Appeals. They noted that more than 160 wrongfully convicted people across the country have been exonerated through DNA evidence -- including dozens who had falsely confessed to crimes. They said Bradford confessed only after an eight-hour interrogation by Yakima police, then flubbed more than a dozen details about the crime. He denied that there was a baby in the house, for example, even though the woman told police her infant was wailing loudly throughout the attack. He also said he simply left afterward, though the woman said her attacker went through her purse, then used a wire hanger to tie her to the baby's crib. "One of the things that's most striking is the fact that virtually nothing about his statement to police matched the actual crime," Ficcaglia said. "You see that time and time again in false confessions." Eilmes, however, points out that the way police interrogated Bradford already has been reviewed in an earlier appeal. "He did confess to this," he said, "and the process by which the Police Department interviewed him has been upheld by the Court of Appeals." Police decided to question Bradford about the rape about 6 months after it happened, when he was arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure not far from the victim's house. Bradford -- who was 22 at the time and is about 5 inches shorter than the attacker the victim described -- said they told him they had DNA evidence as they pressed him to confess. "The ironic thing, of course, is that there wasn't physical evidence," Ficcaglia said, "and now the only physical evidence points to his innocence." (source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
