The wife of Demetrius Colbert, a Marianna man convicted last month by a federal jury of being a major drug dealer in Crittenden County in 2010 and 2011, was charged Thursday with lying during his trial to protect him.
Catina Davis, also of Marianna, was charged with two counts of perjury. Both charges stem from her June 5 testimony, in which she denied helping Colbert disguise the use of $12,000 in illegal drug proceeds to make a down payment on a house in late 2010.
Davis had pleaded guilty on April 27, 2012, to a money laundering charge in exchange for other charges against her being dropped. Her plea agreement required her to testify at Colbert's trial that she helped him make the down payment by delivering $12,000 of his drug proceeds to two of her sisters, taking them to buy two $6,000 cashier's checks and then giving the checks to Colbert to make the down payment. Prosecutors said he used the cashier's checks as part of a $30,000 down payment on a Marianna house.
According to a partial transcript of her 2012 plea hearing, Davis told the judge at least three times that she knew the $12,000 cash that she helped convert into cashier's checks constituted drug proceeds. The transcript was incorporated into the indictment.
It says that when called to testify as a government witness at Colbert's trial last month, Davis changed her story, saying she used $12,000 from Colbert to buy a money order at her bank, then used the money order to make a down payment on the house with Colbert.
Asked if she knew where Colbert got the $12,000, she replied, "Well, I know he had his detailing business and he was selling clothes and stuff as well."
After an assistant U.S. attorney asked Davis about her money laundering plea, she told jurors that her guilty plea involved "the $12,000 that, you know ... they said was drug money."
The prosecutor asked her directly, "Was it drug money?" and she replied, "No, not that I know of."
The indictment alleges that Davis' testimony at the trial was false in that she didn't use the cash to purchase a money order herself. It also alleges that her testimony was inconsistent with her prior sworn statement during her plea hearing about the source of the $12,000, which it said means that "one of them is necessarily false."
The indictment notes that Davis was sentenced on Sept. 12, 2012, to two years in prison, to be followed by three years of probation, but that U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller signed a sealed order on Dec. 13, 2013, reducing her sentence to 18 months at the request of prosecutors.
The house in question, located at 401 Hillcrest St. in Marianna, was featured prominently in Colbert's trial. It was the scene of a shootout between FBI agents and Colbert when agents executed an arrest warrant at the house about 4 a.m. on Oct. 11, 2011.
Davis, 30, testified that she, Colbert and the couple's two young children were asleep in the house at the time of the raid. She said she didn't realize at first it was a law enforcement raid and she feared that her two children would be injured or killed.
Colbert, 38, was convicted on June 6 of all six felony charges he faced: conspiracy to possess with intent to deliver more than 5 kilograms of cocaine, two counts of using a telephone to facilitate a drug-trafficking conspiracy, being a felon in possession of a firearm, assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking conspiracy.
Prosecutors said an FBI agent from Virginia, Wendell Cosenza, was wounded in the leg by a bullet fired from inside the house when the pre-dawn raid began.
The raid was one of numerous simultaneous raids being executed by more than 700 law enforcement officers as part of an FBI-led investigation called Operation Delta Blues, which had resulted in seven indictments naming 71 defendants that had remained sealed until later that day. Colbert was the only one of four accused major drug dealers who went to trial -- the others pleaded guilty.
Colbert hasn't yet been sentenced.
Metro on 07/04/2014