Oct. 22 NEW JERSEY: 2 COULD FACE DEATH PENALTY -- Armanious murder suspects indicted The 2 men accused of killing a Jersey City family of 4 in their home during a robbery in January are facing possible death sentences, officials said yesterday. A grand jury handed up capital murder charges this week against Edward McDonald, 25, and Hamilton Sanchez, 30, both convicted drug dealers. They have been in jail since their arrest in March in the murders of Hossam Armanious, 47; his wife, Amal Garas, 37; and their daughters, Sylvia, 16, and Monica, 9, Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said yesterday. All 4 were bound and stabbed to death inside their Oakland Avenue home on the night of Jan. 11, officials said. The indictments charge each man with 2 counts of murder and give a future jury the options of convicting them of capital murder, murder, or felony murder, DeFazio said. Both also are charged with armed robbery, armed burglary, weapons offenses, theft by deception and fraudulent use of the family's ATM card, DeFazio said. At the time of the murders McDonald was the Armanious' upstairs tenant and Sanchez was living in a Newark halfway house. Security video at a Jersey City Heights bank captured images of McDonald's mother's car in a drive-through ATM lane while the Armanious card was used, officials said. Investigators brought McDonald in on March 3 and he confessed while being interviewed and hooked up to a polygraph machine. McDonald's statement led to Sanchez's arrest the next day, officials said. The murders drew international attention and caused tensions between Jersey City's Egyptian Coptic Christians and Muslims when it was believed by some in the community that there was a religious motivation behind the slayings. The Armanious family were Coptic. Each defendant is being held on $10 million bail and they are expected to be arraigned on the charges next month, DeFazio said. New Jersey has not imposed the death penalty in more than 4 decades, DeFazio noted. (source: The Jersey Journal) CALIFORNIA: Laci Peterson's Mother to Get Insurance Benefit A judge has ruled that the $250,000 life insurance policy that Scott Peterson took out on his wife will go to her mother. Stanislaus County Superior Court Judge Roger Beauchesne said Friday that because Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, and the fetus she carried in 2002, he is not entitled to collect the benefits of her life insurance. The judge said the money should go to the executor of her estate, who is her mother, Sharon Rocha. Scott Peterson was sentenced to death earlier this year. (source: Los Angeles Times) FLORIDA: Jury Recommends Death for Fla. Cop Killer In Pensacola, a jury recommended the death sentence Friday for a man who said he shot a retired policeman because he believed the University of Alabama "A" on the victim's baseball cap signified he was the Antichrist. Ryan Thomas Green, 22, was convicted Thursday of 1st-degree murder and attempted murder. Green, who has a history of mental illness, pleaded insanity. Circuit Judge John Kuder is not bound by the jury's recommendation and didn't set a date for the sentencing hearing. The only other sentence for 1st-degree murder is life in prison without parole. Retired Pensacola Sgt. James Hallman, 59, was shot to death while taking a walk in 2003. Housepainter Christopher Phipps was wounded and is now in a wheelchair. Green testified that a talking bull, religious signs, colors and symbols led him to shoot the 2 men. But prosecutors argued that Green was sane and that he shot the retired officer because he wanted to steal his car and gun. They said he shot Hallman because the victim had witnessed Green shooting a bull in a pasture. Green's trial was delayed more than a year after he was declared mentally incompetent. He later was found competent for trial after undergoing treatment. (source: Associated Press) ********************* Boy's killer sentenced to death----Jacksonville man shot, killed father and son, injured woman A Jacksonville man convicted of killing his roommate and the man's 13-year-old son to eliminate a witness was sentenced Friday to death, the first death sentence imposed here in 2 years. Circuit Judge Lawrence P. Haddock issued 2 death sentences for Thomas Eugene Bevel, 24. A jury found Bevel guilty of 1st-degree murder in the Feb. 29, 2004, shooting deaths of Phillip Sims, a student at Mayport Middle School, and his father, Garrick Stringfield, 32, at the Colchester Road home where Bevel lived with Stringfield. Bevel also received a consecutive life sentence for attempted first-degree murder in the shooting of Stringfield's girlfriend, Felitta Smith, who suffered life-threatening injuries and was left for dead by Bevel. "This was a senseless and brutal murder of an unarmed 13-year-old boy," Haddock said. "The defendant made a cold and deliberate decision that his escape from the murder of Garrick Stringfield outweighed the taking of a life of an innocent child." The judge noted that Smith was "an innocent victim who will have to live the rest of her life with the physical and emotional scars of the defendant's crime." During the trial in August, jurors heard that the boy's mother, Sojourner Sims Parker, took her son to his father's house on the Northside for a weekend visit. The boy was on the living room sofa playing video games when he was shot with the AK-47 automatic rifle Bevel had just used to kill Stringfield and shoot Smith. Bevel then locked the burglar bar door of the home and fled in Stringfield's car, the jury heard. When Smith was able to call 911, emergency personnel had to break down the door to get inside. During the penalty phase of the trial, the jurors voted 12-0 to recommend the death penalty for the boy's murder and 8-4 for death in his father's murder. After the death sentences were imposed Friday, Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda told the victims' relatives, "It won't bring them back, but at least you know that justice was served." The prosecutor termed the crimes "the most horrific murders, especially the murder of a child shot twice in the head." "I'm glad it is over," said Parker, the boy's mother. "I will hold on to the good memories, the fun times we had together." Stringfield's mother, Priscilla Frink, said she was relieved that the long process of justice was over. "He was my baby," she said. "He didn't deserve what happened." (source: The Florida Times-Union) ALABAMA: Taped phone call: Jones admits killing Mobile County woman The jury in the capital murder trial of accused serial killer Jeremy Bryan Jones heard a recorded telephone conversation Friday in which he admitted killing a Mobile County woman while high on drugs. "It was like a nightmare, I was in a movie," Jones said in the Dec. 10, 2004 recorded conversation from jail. After hearing it played to the jury, Jones wiped his eyes with a handkerchief as the courtroom fell silent. In the taped call, Jones told Mark Bentley, a former friend and a neighbor of the slain woman, Lisa Marie Nichols, that he needed prayer. "Pray for you?" asked Bentley. "Do you think it will do any good?" "Yeah, it can't hurt, can it?" Jones said. Bentley, a prosecution witness, testified Friday morning that he had allowed Jones, a 32-year-old construction worker from Miami, Okla., to stay in Bentley's home when Jones arrived unannounced days before Hurricane Ivan struck in September 2004. Jones had worked for Bentley several years earlier. Nichols lived alone in a mobile home near Bentley in the rural Turnerville community, which lost electrical power during the hurricane. Nichols, 44, was raped and shot three times in the head on Sept. 17, 2004. Her body was burned and later found by her two daughters and a son-in-law. In testimony, Bentley described how they entered the smoke-filled home with a flashlight and discovered the body. "I was freaked out," Bentley said. "She was burned up. It just about killed me." Jones had remained behind in the Bentley home and didn't go to the crime scene. "He asked me what did it look like over there," Bentley recalled. In the Dec. 10 taped statement, Jones said he didn't know why he did it. "I was higher than I had ever been in my whole life," Jones said. Bentley told Jones, "I thought I knew you, but I don't." "You knew me. You just didn't know me on drugs," Jones replied. When arrested Sept. 21, 2004, Jones was using the alias John Paul Chapman, later determined to be Missouri prisoner. Jones' attorney has conceded that Jones had a history of abusing methamphetamines, but argued that police had arrested the wrong man. Jones' girlfriend, Vicki Freeman of Douglasville, Ga., his mother, Jeanne Beard of Miami, Okla., and several other relatives attended Friday's court session. Jones mouthed "I love you" to his mother seated in the courtroom for the first time Friday. Beard said she believes her son is innocent. "I only have 2 sons," she said. "He's a good boy." Jones has also been charged with murder in separate slayings in Georgia and New Orleans. An investigator said Friday that about 10 other unsolved slayings have possible links to Jones and the number could be 20. Mobile County sheriff's detective Paul Burch said some of the other cases without charges apparently involve slain Atlanta prostitutes. Jones is charged with murder in the death of Amanda Greenwell, a 16-year-old in Douglasville, Ga., whose remains were found in April 2004, and Katherine Collins, a 45-year-old New Orleans woman whose body was found in February 2004. Authorities have said Jones confessed to or is being investigated in the deaths of a couple and the disappearance of two teenage girls in Oklahoma, as well as the killing of another woman in Georgia. Testimony will continue Saturday and Sunday afternoon in a rare weekend session because the jury is sequestered. (source: The Tuscaloosa News) OHIO: Drug evidence used by lawyer----Defense attorney says Trimble was under influence and unable to form intent to commit capital murder James Trimble was under the influence of drugs the night and morning prosecutors say he killed three people, one of his attorneys told the court Thursday. Defense lawyer Dennis Day Lager, in a procedural move, read into the court record what he said was intoxication evidence that indicated Trimble became violent when on the drugs. Consequently, he said, Trimble couldn't have formed the necessary intent to commit capital murder. The jury did not hear Lager's claim. Ohio does not allow voluntary intoxication as a defense to Trimble's alleged crimes. If Trimble is convicted of aggravated murder, however, the defense could use Thursday's evidence during the sentencing phase. Drug use could be a mitigating circumstance to keep Trimble from being put to death. Trimble, 45, faces 3 counts of aggravated murder; each of them carries the possibility of the death penalty. He is accused of shooting his 42-year-old girlfriend, Renee Bauer, and her 7-year-old son, Dakota, on Jan. 21 in the Sandy Lake Road home they shared. Police say he then roamed the Brimfield Township woods, shooting at them with an AR-15 assault rifle, before taking 22-year-old Kent State student Sarah Positano hostage in her Ranfield Road apartment. He killed her just after midnight, prosecutors say. Lager said methamphetamines and a "cocaine derivative" were found in Trimble's hair from a test taken in April. Lager said his expert would testify that if the drugs were found then -- after Trimble had been in jail for three months -- then it was in his system in very high doses the night of the shootings. Lager also said that on June 25, 2004, Brimfield safety forces came to Trimble and Bauer's Sandy Lake Road home because Trimble had overdosed on drugs. When he was taken to the hospital, Trimble became so violent that the doctors had to paralyze him and hook him up to a ventilator, Lager told the court. The jury will take the case after closing arguments Monday. Portage County Common Pleas Judge John Enlow said he expects to have his jury instructions completed today. (source: Beacon Journal)
