06 Nov 2012
The retrial for Vanessa Coleman is set to begin next week. She was convicted for facilitating the murder of 21 year old girl, who was raped and bleaching liquid was poured over her mutilated genitals, in desperate measure to conceal the crime.
Coleman was also charged for setting fire the 21 year old girl’s boyfriend in 2007.
In bizarre twist, the second judge who will preside at the retrial has granted permission to a hair-dresser to visit Vanessa Coleman at the jail to give her a make-over. The first judge in Coleman’s trial was sent home after he admitted irregularities while presiding in March 2011.
Coleman, 24, had faced the death penalty for her alleged role in the killing of the couple in 2007, but she was acquitted of Newsom’s kidnapping, rape and murder and deemed only a facilitator against Miss Christian in her death.
‘I haven’t slept for five-and-a-half years,’ Miss Christian’s mother Deena told WATE. ‘There’s not a second of a day that goes by that we still don’t think about what they did to our daughter.’
The double jeopardy rule protecting defendants means Coleman cannot be retried in Mr Newsom’s case and prosecutors can no longer seek the death penalty, reported the Knoxville News Sentinel.
The court has been asked by Coleman’s defense to exclude color pictures of blood and injuries, for fears they would shock and bias the jury, and certain gun evidence. The judge is yet to rule on this.
The trial will start on Monday, but retrials of three other defendants in the case – George ‘G’ Thomas, Lemaricus ‘Slim’ Davidson and Letalvis ‘Rome’ Cobbins – are on hold while the state contests them.
Coleman was originally sentenced in court to 53 years in jail.
Davidson was sentenced to death for his role as ringleader, while Cobbins and Thomas were given life without the chance of parole. The retrial was ordered and then an astonishing Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report into Judge Baumgartner showed he was addicted to painkillers for pancreatitis, caused by chronic alcoholism.
He wanted doctors to prescribe him oxycodone, hydrocodone and generic Xanax and Valium, the report said. When this was insufficient, he turned to convicts he had punished – and their friends.
One supplier was Deena Castleman, who graduated from his drug court.
She told authorities that she regularly supplied the judge with pills and sex, sometimes even during court breaks.
The woman, who was nearly half his age and had a history of arrests, told TBI agents that she and the judge even engaged in sexual activity several times in the judge’s chambers.
‘Some saw it, but they ignored it,’ Judge Blackwood said.
‘Some saw it, but they were powerless to act or deal with it, and some saw it and they either denied it or denied it to themselves.’
University of Tennessee student Miss Christian and Mr Newson were murdered in the most brutal way imaginable in January 2007 after being carjacked after a Saturday night date.
Mr Newsom, a talented carpenter and former high school baseball player, and Miss Christian had gone to a friend’s home after a date at a local restaurant when they were held up at gunpoint.
They were forced to drive to an old clapboard house in one of Knoxville’s toughest areas, where their captors subjected them to a nightmare ordeal which now happened more than five years ago.
Mr Newsom was tied up and raped, shot in the back of the head and then dragged to a railway track and set on fire. But his girlfriend’s death came after she was raped and savaged with a chair leg.
She was beaten in the head and household bleach was poured down her throat and over her bleeding and battered genital area in an attempt by her attackers to cover any evidence of rape.
Then she was ‘hog-tied’ with curtains and a strip of bedding and a plastic bag was wrapped over her face. Her body was stashed inside five rubbish liners and dumped in a bin, where she suffocated.
But the killings attracted little coverage, after failing to fit into the normal contours of a Deep South attack, where assaults by whites on blacks have historically been regarded in the context of race.
In this case, the races were reversed. However John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney Randy Nichols, said at the time that it was ‘a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive’.
‘There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,’ he said.
‘We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialized with white people, dated white people.
‘So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary,’ he added.
But that didn’t stop critics from blaming liberal bias in the US mainstream media for failing to cover the attacks.
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds said the American media has a ‘template’ for covering white-on-black crime, but not the reverse.
‘I think it would have gotten a lot of national play faster if it had been a black couple kidnapped and killed by five white people,’ he told the local paper in Knoxville.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2228621/Vanessa-Coleman-retrial-Astonishing-case-rape-torture-murder-young-couple.html#ixzz2BTyf6Bdf
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