Resentencings due for kids who killed in Arkansas

Dozens affected as state follows through on U.S. Supreme Court ruling

Cop-killers, robbers who gunned down victims and murderers who've wiped out their own families -- if they were younger than 18 when they committed their crimes and convicted of capital murder before 2012 -- are all coming back to Arkansas courts for new sentencing.

For the more than 50 affected inmates this will possibly be the last chance they will get at leaving prison before they die.

One defendant who has been locked up for more than 40 years is Robert Lee Brown of Aubrey. He pleaded guilty at age 17 in July 1976 to capital murder and arson in Lee County for participating with his brother in the July 1975 stabbing death of 63-year-old Verlin Lottie Williams.

Williams was a widow who was killed in a robbery by Brown and his older brother of the Aubrey grocery store she both operated and lived in. A money bag with $266 had been left behind. Brown had been stabbed 34 times, and her body and the store's interior had been doused in gasoline to start the fire.

The brothers were arrested the day of the killing and each was sentenced to life, with Brown accepting a life sentence rather than face the death penalty at trial. His brother also received life for first-degree murder. Capital punishment had just been reinstated when Williams was killed. The U.S. Supreme Court barred the execution of teenage criminals in a 2005 decision.

Bennie Hatley of Little Rock was 17 years old in February 1985 when he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing two Cotton Plant police officers -- Chief Leonard Cross and patrolman Roy Leon were the town's whole force -- who had tried to arrest him for stealing a motorcycle. The Woodruff County jury could have given him the death penalty after convicting him of capital murder.

Jimmy Scherrer of Reyno received his life sentence in 1986 when a Desha County jury convicted him of capital murder for, at age 16, helping his 18-year-old cousin kidnap, rape and kill Dumas teacher Debbie Watts the year before.

Three days after she was last known to have been alive, the 25-year-old woman's naked body was found in a bayou with her hands and feet tied and her throat cut. Prosecutors had evidence that Watts, who was black, had been picked out at random by the Scherrer cousins and a third teen, all white, to get revenge for the rape and beating of that third teen's mother by two black men.

Not all of the returning convicts are killers. William Davis was convicted of capital murder at trial for, at age 17, helping his best friend, 16-year-old Matthew Elliot, kill Elliot's pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend in Magnolia in February 2000.

Elliot, who accepted his sentence by pleading guilty to capital murder, lured the girl, Brittni Pater, out of her home in the middle of the night. Once he got her away from the house, Elliot beat her over the head at least 17 times with an aluminum bar before driving over her head to make sure she died.

Davis did not take part in the killing, but authorities said he both provided the metal bar and helped Elliot dig the hole Elliot buried the girl in the day before, even lying in it to make sure it was big enough to hold her.

Now both of them are due new sentencing hearings. But the two U.S. Supreme Court rulings that require resentencings do not allow any of the defendants to challenge their convictions, and they could be resentenced to life in prison, authorities say.

Gregg Parrish, executive director of the state Public Defender Commission, which provides lawyers for criminal defendants who can't afford legal representation, said that while individual resentencing hearings aren't unusual, Arkansas hasn't ever seen this type of situation with so many defendants affected before.

Parrish said he's been trying to prepare for this for the past three years because public defenders will have to assume much of the work representing the returning defendants. He said he's hopeful a significant number of cases can be resolved through negotiation without requiring a hearing.

"It becomes a nightmare for a public defender already trying to maintain a heavy caseload," he said. "I think we'll get around 90 percent."

Providing services for the additional defendants is expected to strain the commission's resources, both fiscal and personnel, but he's not ready to estimate how much, he said.

Some defendants can afford to hire private counsel, but the commission is also under court order to pay for ancillary legal services for defendants who can't do more than pay their lawyers, he said. That can mean providing expert witnesses, investigators and mitigation services, he said.

Some of the defendants will also require private attorneys who will have to be paid by the commission because the agency is restricted in how it provides them lawyers, Parrish said. These are the defendants who went to court to dispute the competency of the defenders who represented them at trial through what is colloquially known as a Rule 37 hearing. It's a common post-conviction tactic that gives defendants another avenue for appeal after conviction.

It's taken almost four years for Arkansas courts to figure out how to respond to the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. Alabama, which bars the practice of automatic life sentences for teenage murderers.

One of the plaintiffs in that case was an Arkansas man, 30-year-old Kuntrell Jackson. He was 14 years old in November 1999 when he acted as the lookout in a robbery attempt in Blytheville. The killer, Derrick Xavier Shields, who was also 14, shot store clerk Laurie Troup with a shotgun.

The men were convicted at separate trials in 2003 in Mississippi County, and Shields, now 30, is one of the dozens of inmates sentenced to life in 26 Arkansas counties between 1976 and 2010 now due a new sentencing hearing. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling effectively made Jackson, who had been the lookout in the robbery, eligible for parole as of April 2015, although his early release was denied by the Arkansas Board of Parole.

Miller was an extension of the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling that barred life-without-parole sentences for minors who commit serious crimes, except for murder.

The high court found that the practice of locking up teenagers for life without giving them a chance at parole violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment because that automatic life, which the court compared to the death penalty, does not take into consideration that children are different than adults.

By virtue of their age, juvenile defendants are immature, impetuous and often unable to appreciate risks and consequences, but they also have a greater capacity for reform, the court ruled. Automatic life sentences also do not take those factors into consideration.

The practice also fails the constitutionality test, according to the Supreme Court, because it does not allow a sentence that takes into account the defendant's upbringing, family and home environment, no matter how brutal and dysfunctional those factors may be; children are trapped by them.

The effects of the Miller decision have taken this long to be felt because the question of whether the decision could be applied retroactively had to be resolved first.

The Arkansas Supreme Court took up the issue and ruled last year that it applied to every inmate serving a life sentence for crimes committed as teenagers. The high court reached that conclusion in the case of Ulonzo Gordon, who at age 17 in January 1995 helped a friend who chased down and killed a 21-year-old man who had shot the friend in West Memphis.

Gordon, now 38, and his co-defendants were convicted at trial together in Crittenden County in June 1995 and all received the automatic life sentences. Gordon, however, is the only one young enough to qualify for new sentencing.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge attempted to appeal the state court's decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the federal justices declined to hear the appeal, ruling last January in a case from Louisiana that the Miller decision did apply retroactively.

That decision allowed the eligible Arkansas prisoners to either petition the courts for a new sentencing hearing or complete the petition process to get a court order, a habeas corpus writ, nullifying their life sentences if they'd applied to the court before January.

Most of the habeas petitions were filed in 2013 in response to the Miller ruling, and most of them have gone through, or will be heard, in the circuit courts of Jefferson County and Lincoln County, since those counties are where the inmates are in prison, according to Judd Deere, spokesman for the attorney general, who represents the state in the hearings. Deere said state attorneys answer an average of 200 petitions a year, 150 in federal court and 50 in the state courts.

Gordon's hearing was the first to be scheduled, and his resentencing is set in December in Crittenden Circuit Court.

The second defendant to get a re-sentencing hearing was Montrell Ventry who was convicted of capital murder in Saline County for fatally shooting 24-year-old Nicholas Jones of Sherwood during an August 2007 robbery when Ventry was 17. He is scheduled for sentencing in March.

In Pulaski County, 18 defendants qualify for new sentencings. In an interview, chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson said that the re-sentencings present "unique challenges" in locating witnesses in cases that date back to the early 1990s. He said the hardest part will be informing friends and family of the victims.

"This was probably the worst thing in their lives and they have to go through it again," Johnson said.

The oldest case in Little Rock is from 1980 for Edward Littles of Illinois, now 51. Littles was 16 when he killed a Little Rock police detective, 23-year-old Noel Don McGuire. The Police Department's rookie of the year award is named for McGuire.

Testimony at Littles' trial was that he opened fire on McGuire as the officer was walking away and that Littles bragged in front of police after his arrest about how he had wielded his pistol with one hand when he opened fire, even demonstrating how he did it for officers. A Pulaski County jury declined to impose the death penalty.

The first two convicts eligible for re-sentencing in Pulaski County made their first appearances last week.

Detric Avelle Franklin, now 31, has been behind bars since he was arrested at age 16 for killing 23-year-old Richard Campbell and wounding 27-year-old Thomas Bryan in a shooting ambush in July 1991 as the men entered their apartment building on Maple Street in North Little Rock.

The men had been patrolling their neighborhood as an informal neighborhood watch wearing shirts indicating they were security guards. Bryan, who identified Franklin as the gunman, was carrying a baseball bat. Both men were shot in the back.

Jurors deliberated about 90 minutes to find Franklin guilty, but spared him the death penalty at his April 1992 trial. Circuit Judge Leon Johnson set Franklin's new sentencing hearing for November.

William Smith Nazeem made his first appearance on Thursday before Circuit Judge Barry Sims, who set his sentencing for December.

Nazeem, 43, was 17 years old when he gunned down 19-year-old Michael Cooksey in October 1989 at the Eastgate Terrace apartments in North Little Rock. Nazeem testified at trial that he shot Cooksey in self-defense with a sawed-off shotgun because he was afraid that Cooksey was going to shoot him over a drug deal gone bad.

Cooksey had started an altercation by punching him repeatedly in the face, according to Nazeem, whose account was backed up by testimony from his mother.

Jurors found him guilty in less than 30 minutes.

Metro on 07/04/2016

The cases

Prisoner list by county with year of conviction provided by attorney Jeff Rosenzweig.

ARKANSAS

Terry Sims, 1994. Brandon Isbell, 1995. Clint Lammers, 1996.

ASHLEY

Vernon Robinson, 1983. Cedric Harris, 1995.

BOONE

Benjamin MacFarland, 1997.

CHICOT

Damon Sanford, 1996.

CLARK

Thernell Hundley, 1987.

COLUMBIA

Steven Miller, 1996. Matthew Elliott, 2000. William Davis, 2000.

CRAIGHEAD

Aaron Hodge, 1996.

CRAWFORD

Tony Ray, 1997.

CRITTENDEN

David Lasley, 1980. Ulonzo Gordon, 1995. Corey Conner, 1997.

CROSS

Richard Cox, 1996.

DESHA

Jimmy Scherrer, 1986.

DREW

Derrick Harris, 1996.

HEMPSTEAD

Marlon Howell, 2000.

INDEPENDENCE

Frankie Taylor, 1992.

JEFFERSON

Nakia Davis, 1994. Seanell Moore, 1995. Brandon Flowers, 1999.

LEE

Robert Brown, 1975.

MISSISSIPPI

Derrick Shields, 2003. Julius Yankaway, 2005. Dheaslee Wright, 2007.

NEVADA

Robert Williams, 2007.

OUACHITA

Richard Hill, 2000.

POPE

Kevin Lloyd, 1996.

PULASKI

Edward Littles, 1980. William Smith, 1990. Prince Johnson, 1991. Charles Lee, 1991. Detric Franklin, 1992. Laquanda Jacobs, 1993. Raymond Mack, 1994. Durrell Childress, 1994. Randy Wilkins, 1995. Terry Carroll, 1997. Wallace Allen, 1998. Charles Jackson, 2000. Mervin Jenkins, 2000. Tyrone Duncan, 2001. Roderick Lewis, 2002. Brandon Hardman, 2002. Damarcus Jordan, 2003. Lemuel Whiteside, 2010.

SALINE

Chad Kitchell, 1992. Montrell Ventry, 2008.

SEVIER

Timothy Oliver, 1987.

WASHINGTON

Dennis Lewis, 1975. James Van Cleve, 1978. Christopher Segerstrom, 1987.

WHITE

James Grubbs, 1995.

WOODRUFF

Benny Hatley, 1985.

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