Vance found guilty of all counts

LITTLE ROCK — A Pulaski County jury deliberated 2 1/2 hours Wednesday before finding Curtis Lavelle Vance guilty of capital murder for fatally beating Little Rock TV news anchor Anne Pressly during an October 2008 break-in at her Little Rock home.

The jury of six men and six women could decide today whether the 29-year-old Marianna man should die for beating the 26-year-old KATV, Channel 7, reporter, an attack that prosecutors say was so brutal that he deserves to be executed for it. She died five days after her mother found her on Oct. 20.

A death-penalty recommendation requires a unanimous jury decision; anything less will result in a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors urged jurors to carefully weigh the evidence favoring execution as the sentencing hearing began Wednesday afternoon. Proceedings resume with defense testimony at 9:30 a.m. today.

“It’s hard, hard work you’ve done, and now there’s more,” chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson told the jurors. “Just because something’s hard doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Use common sense to consider what he’s done to Anne Pressly, how he did it and why he did it. The conclusion is that Curtis Vance has forfeited his right to walk among us.”

But defense attorney Katherine Streett asked jurors to listen to witnesses who will testify about Vance’s life of abuse and deprivation. Streett said the defense will provide jurors with a lot of information about his childhood and warned that the display could grow tedious, but she asked them to pay close attention.

“These things should matter ... in your decision as to whether he lives or dies,” she said.

The jurors found Vance guilty on all charges: capital murder, rape, residential burglary and theft.

After the verdict was read, Pressly’s family and supporters waited until jurors were dismissed for a break before they broke into tears and hugs. Pressly’s mother, Patti Cannady, hadn’t been allowed to attend the proceedings until Wednesday’s closing arguments because she was a witness in the case. Her husband, Guy Cannady, waived his right to testify so he could watch his wife testify.

Vance appeared calm as Circuit Judge Chris Piazza read the guilty verdict. Vance rubbed his temple with his left hand then rested his head in his hands. As he boarded a van later for the trip back to jail, he was defiant.

“It’s a corrupt system,” he shouted as his family engaged in a shouting contest with reporters yelling questions at Vance.

“We love you, Lavelle,” his mother, Jacqueline Vance Burnett, called to him.

Wednesday’s verdict followed five days of gruesome testimony about Pressly’s injuries, first from her mother who described trying to stanch a bleeding wound that left her daughter whimpering.

The nurse who performed a rape exam on Pressly testified last week that during the examination she couldn’t tell that Pressly was a woman.

“Her jaw was over to the side. It [her face] was not symmetrical,” said Carla Jackson, who said Pressly entered the hospital bleeding from the sides of her head.

“My first thought was I couldn’t believe this person was alive,” Jackson testified, saying there was so much blood it could have obscured other injuries.

On the same day that Jackson testified, the emergency room doctor, Dr. Theresa McBride, told jurors that Pressly’s face was “not recognizable as human.” When the stricken TV reporter was admitted, Pressly’s “nose was so badly crushed it didn’t look like a nose,” and her jaw was so far dislocated that it appeared to be part of her neck, said McBride, who testified that she spent 2 1/2 hours treating and stabilizing Pressly.

In testimony Tuesday, Dr. Stephen Erickson, the state’s deputy chief medical examiner, said Pressly was struck at least a dozen times, several times in the face, with each blow splitting her skin. He said she suffered five skull fractures.

The blow to her jaw alone could’ve killed her, Erickson testified, saying that it was so hard that it fractured her skull and impeded the brain’s oxygen supply. The doctor compared some of her injuries to a broken eggshell, saying that her face was so badly broken that it had come loose from her cranium and crunched at times as he examined it.

In his closing argument Wednesday morning, Johnson told jurors that Pressly slept in her home not knowing that a “scavenger” lurked outside her place of safety.

“There was someone out there,” Johnson said. “That person is the one who makes the dogs bark. He’s the one who rustles the chain-link fence. He’s Curtis Vance, and Curtis Vance was out there looking for what he could take. He broke into Anne Pressly’s [home], and he took from her everything.”

He asked jurors to imagine Pressly’s terror at waking up to the groping touch of a stranger.

“Can you see him standing over her? Can you imagine what he said to her?” Johnson said. “She feels ... that paralyzing fear we’ve all had, we can’t run, we can’t move, we can’t even scream.”

Pressly found the will to fight, Johnson said, and Vance bludgeoned her to death for it.

“He’s getting out of control, and he’s hitting her, swinging for the fences,” Johnson said, as in one hand he held a photo of a smiling Pressly in a pink blouse and in the other an autopsy photo of her battered face and crushed nose. “He kept hitting her until he made this person look like this. He beat her beyond all recognition because she wouldn’t do what he wanted.”

Defense attorney Teri Chambers told jurors that DNA evidence that placed Vance in Pressly’s bedroom and Vance’s own confession that he beat and molested the woman wouldn’t hold up if they looked at it closely. Chambers acknowledged that the evidence seemed damning.

“I’m not going to stand up here and insult your intelligence and say, there’s no way you couldn’t connect Curtis Vance to this crime,” she said, calling Pressly’s death a tragedy and loss. “I know at first blush, you’re saying how can it be that Curtis Vance didn’t commit these crimes - you’ve got DNA and you’ve got a confession?”

But authorities were seeking a capital-murder conviction on the strength of a single hair, she said, backed with less-conclusive DNA evidence that can’t definitively identify Vance as the killer. And jurors couldn’t believe what Vance told police, Chambers said.

“I cannot keep up with the stories he’s told police,” she said. “But one thing abundantly clear is you can’t base anything on what comes out of his mouth. I don’t know how you decide what to believe or not to believe.”

Authorities had decided that Vance was the killer and didn’t bother to follow evidence elsewhere, even willfully overlooking the involvement of others, she said.

“The police and prosecutors decided a long time ago that Curtis committed this crime alone,” she said. “The state’s position is if the evidence connects Curtis to the crime, it’s reliable. But if it doesn’t or it connects to someone else, it doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you who it was, but the evidence indicates the presence of more than one person. This case has been closed, and it will not be investigated further if you convict Curtis of capital murder.”

Piazza began the penalty phase of the trial following a short break after the verdict was read.

Prosecutors presented five reasons, called aggravated circumstances, for jurors to justify a death sentence. Those circumstances include Vance’s past use of violence and that Pressly’s death was so horrific that it demands the ultimate sanction. Jurors must believe only one to call for the death penalty.

In the punishment phase of the trial, prosecutors called only four witnesses, opening with Kristen Edwards, the 33-year-old educator whose April 2008 rape produced DNA evidence that eventually linked Vance to Pressly’s slaying. Vance is charged with rape in Lee County over Edwards’ attack but has not faced trial yet on that charge. Edwards has never been able to identify him as her attacker, but he has been charged based on DNA evidence found from her rape exam. She was sodomized because she was overpowered, she testified.

“I just spent the whole time thinking I was about to die. I don’t know how to explain how [difficult] it was, someone violent against me, someone in my home doing those things,” she told jurors. “He was so much bigger than me. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have an option but to do what I had to do.”

Prosecutors ended their part of the punishment hearing with testimony from Cannady, who described last week finding her daughter disfigured in her bloody bed. On Wednesday, she described her anguish at losing her only child.

“She was such a great joy,” she told the jurors, her voice ragged with grief. “All I’m trying to do is stay strong enough to get to the other side of the cross and see Anne again.”

Cannady said she was so grief-stricken that she destroyed family heirlooms because she has no descendants to inherit them. Her daughter was Christ-loving but “salty and full of sass,” she said.

She read from a Mother’s Day letter that Pressly wrote her at age 5. She chuckled at the childish spelling but choked up on her daughter’s promise of eternal love. “‘My mother is a wonderful and she helps me when I’m sick,’” Cannady recited from the card. “‘She will love me as long as I live and I will love her too.’”

Defense attorneys, hoping to contrast Pressly’s childhood with that of their client’s, questioned Cannady about how much she supported her daughter.

“You were always there to support her ... mentally, always there to support her emotionally, always there to support her spiritually,” Chambers asked.

“I was,” Cannady said. “I only wish it had been me, not her.”

Prosecutors had one final question for Cannady.

“How would you feel if your words were used to help this man,” Johnson asked, gesturing toward Vance.

“It would make me feel horrible,” Cannady replied.