Louisiana
Harmon gets life sentence in brutal murder
LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) — A state district judge has denied Daniel Harmon’s request for a new trial, and sentenced the 43-year-old man to the mandatory life in prison with no parole for his second-degree murder conviction late last month.
The Advocate reports Judge Glennon Everett presided over the trial that shined a light on the grisly killing almost 24 years ago of Christine Marie Wood.
Wood had been raped, shot three times in the head, and her body and bedroom set on fire to destroy the evidence, witnesses said during the five-day trial in April.
Twelve jurors deliberated for nine hours on April 30 before convicting Harmon in the shooting of Wood in July 1989.
Harmon’s attorney, Alfred Boustany II, requested a new trial in the days after the 10-2 verdict.
In the document, Boustany objected to prosecutors telling the jury about a national database that identified Harmon’s DNA on Wood, saying the mere mention of the Combined DNA Index System implied
Harmon was a past sex offender.
Everett before the trial ruled the jury would not hear about Harmon’s past run-ins with the law, including convictions in 1994 for aggravated kidnapping and rape.
“The implication is the defendant is on the national database,” Boustany said Thursday, and later added the jury “could simply let their imaginations run wild.”
Boustany also recited other points he made in his retrial request, such as investigators not testing the DNA of Michael Dickerson.
Dickerson is serving a 40-year sentence for rape and aggravated oral sexual battery. He lived near the Marigny Circle area of Lafayette Parish and was a neighbor of Wood and Harmon in 1989.
Hands and feet shackled, and wearing the orange garb of a state prisoner, Dickerson testified at Harmon’s trial.
Also testifying was Tasha Stafford, who said she was 14 and Dickerson’s lover in 1989 when Wood’s murder occurred. Stafford said Dickerson told her he had killed Wood.
Assistant District Attorney Roger Hamilton said investigators didn’t test the DNA of others because the evidence pointed directly at Harmon.
“If it’s his DNA, it’s his DNA,” Hamilton said, “and all others are excluded.”
Mississippi
Former medical examiner doubts autopsy report
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A former medical examiner says there are clear holes in his autopsy report on a stillborn fetus — a report used by a prosecutor to charge the mother with manslaughter.
Bruce Levy spoke to The Clarion-Ledger about his report on a fetus stillborn in 2009 to Nina Buckhalter. The manslaughter charge alleged that she took drugs which killed her unborn baby.
A district judge threw out the charge. The Mississippi Supreme Court heard arguments April 2. Levy’s report won’t affect its ruling on whether the state law allowing charges against someone who causes a miscarriage can be used against a mother who takes illegal drugs.
Levy, who was in Tennessee in 2009 and is now in Illinois, said he cannot prove that drug use caused the stillbirth. There’s a strong link between methamphetamines and the type of maternal bleeding that leads to stillbirth, he said, but it’s impossible to assign 100 percent blame to the drug or the mother.
And, he told the newspaper last week, “if this was clearly a stillbirth, I wouldn’t have had a manner of death” — it couldn’t be a homicide if the baby was never alive.
However, he wrote “homicide” on the autopsy report. Buckhalter was indicted on a charge of manslaughter.
Buckhalter was 31 weeks pregnant when she began hemorrhaging on March 14, 2009, the day of her miscarriage at Wesley Medical Center. Drug tests on Burkhalter indicated marijuana, said defense attorney Robert McDuff. Although autopsies typically aren’t ordered for stillbirths, that apparently prompted hospital officials to call the Lamar County Sheriff’s Department, which ordered a fetal autopsy.
At the time, Levy was CEO of Global Forensics of Tennessee, which had Mississippi’s contract for autopsies. His autopsy found trace amounts of methamphetamines in the fetus — amounts McDuff said were far below what’s considered toxic.
Three other pathologists, including Mississippi’s current Chief Medical Examiner Mark LeVaughn, agree that it’s difficult to prove drugs caused death in an adult, much less a fetus.
Kentucky’s Assistant Medical Examiner Gregory J. Davis asked, “Can you tell me that without meth this baby would have been carried to term? Do we know for certain that the mom didn’t have hypertension, wasn’t a cigarette smoker, wasn’t obese? Those are all contributing factors, too.”
Levy, who pleaded guilty three years ago to taking marijuana from evidence lockers at the Tennessee medical examiner’s office and now heads a new pathology informatics program at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he cannot remember ever labeling as stillbirth as a homicide.
He said he wonders whether he was told the baby had been born alive.
Lamar County Sheriff’s Department Investigator David Bullock said, no, the baby definitely died in utero.
“I still don’t understand how that would happen if it was a stillbirth,” Levy said. “But the other interesting thing is that a medical examiner’s or coroner’s ruling of homicide never puts pressure on the district attorneys to prosecute anything, because ours is not criminal ruling. It’s a medical ruling.”
Alabama
Sides agree to mediator in suit on hazing claims
ANNISTON, Ala. (AP) — Court records indicate that a lawsuit over alleged hazing at a Jacksonville State University fraternity will be handled outside of court.
The Anniston Star reports that the plaintiff, Jason Horton, and the defendants, Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, its JSU chapter and fraternity officials, have agreed to mediation.
Michael Petway, Horton’s attorney, said the agreement gives all parties involved 30 days from Friday to agree on a mediator and 30 days after that to set up the mediation.
Horton maintained that fraternity pledges in 2011 were forced to drink mustard and vodka, struck with eggs and flying objects, and beaten repeatedly with fists and paddles.
Horton remained in a hospital for 24 days while recovering from his injuries.
Jacksonville State has since closed the university’s chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha.
