CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

Fifth Circuit Orders Acquittal in 1964 Mississippi Murder Case, Cold Case Initiative Fails, Statute of Limitation Prevails

By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd and Senior Paralegal Billy Sinclair

Several years ago the Federal Bureau of Investigation created a Cold Case Initiative designed to bring to justice persons who committed horrific racially motivated crimes during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era. One of those cases involved James Ford Seale, a former Mississippi deputy sheriff, who was convicted in June 2007 of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the disappearances of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.

The two 19 year old African American men were hitchhiking in rural Franklin County, Mississippi in 1964 when Seale and fellow Klansmen allegedly picked them up, drove them into the Homochito National Forest in Franklin County, brutally interrogated and beat them, bound them with duct tape, tied a car engine block and railroad rail to their bodies, and while they were still alive and presumably pleading for their lives, threw them into the Old Mississippi River. The bodies of the two men were accidentally found two months later during a search for three missing civil rights workers in another infamous civil rights murder case that would become known as the “Mississippi Burning” case.

Seal and another man named Charles Edwards were arrested for the murders of Moore and Dee in 1964 but were immediately released on bond and were never tried. After the FBI turned the case over to local authorities, a justice of the peace dismissed the charges saying witnesses refused to testify against Seale and Edwards.

Law enforcement interest in the case was revived when Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas, discovered that Seale was still alive during a visit to Franklin County in 2007 as part of a documentary being produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the civil rights slayings. Thomas Moore gave the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi the FBI files on the case which he had obtained from a Mississippi reporter. That prompted Assistant U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton to assist in the creation of a task force that re-opened the four decade old murder cases. The FBI-led task force generated enough evidence to produce an indictment against Seale. The FBI hailed the indictment as a prime example of its efforts to close cold cases from the civil rights era. (more…)

By:  Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair

Would you want a Judge presiding over a criminal case against you sleeping with the District Attorney prosecuting that case?

Didn’t think so. Most people wouldn’t. You expect a Judge to be neutral, free of the slightest appearance of impropriety. You expect a District Attorney to be zealous, honest, and even-handed in the prosecution of criminal cases. Those general expectations – what the State Bar calls the rules of ethical conduct – are compromised when a District Attorney prosecutes a case before a Judge with whom the District Attorney is having a sexual liaison.

That controversial issue has become a highly-publicized feature in the capital murder case of Charles Dean Hood. Attorneys working to save Hood from lethal injection charged, and ultimately proved, that 19 years ago when the condemned inmate was tried and convicted in a Collin County District Court, former District Attorney Tom O’Connell, who prosecuted Hood, was reportedly having a romantic affair the former trial judge, Verla Sue Holland, who presided over the trial.

Hood was scheduled for execution on September 10, 2008, but the day before the execution was to be carried out, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a reprieve in the case. The appeals court, on which Holland had previously served as a judge, ducked the sexual liaison issue involving Holland and O’Connell and instead issued the reprieve on what the court said were “developments in the law regarding (jury) nullification instructions.”

The appeals court had previously rejected this same jury instruction issue in Hood’s case but said it was now “prudent to reconsider the decision we [previously] issued.” (more…)

Two Cases of Child Murder; Only One Faces Death Penalty

By: Criminal Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd and Senior Paralegal Billy Sinclair

The District Attorney’s Office in Galveston, Texas, has in recent months confronted death penalty decisions in two high profile cases involving parents brutally murdering their children. Both cases allegedly involved parents killing their children in a calculated, premeditated manner. In April 2008 the District Attorney elected not to seek the death penalty in one case but in August 2008 decided to seek the death penalty in the other. Why?

Let it be stated very firmly at the outset of this piece that we do not support the death penalty in any case under any circumstances. We are a criminal defense law firm dedicated to the preservation of life and liberty– not death. But the disparity in the decision-making by the Galveston County District Attorney’s Office in these two capital child murder cases begs scrutiny.

The first case involves Riley Ann Sawyers, a beautiful two-year-old child who became known to the nation as “Baby Grace.” The child’s biological mother, Kimberly Trenor, and her stepfather, Royce Zeigler II, were reportedly upset with the child’s manners. By the mother’s account, Riley Ann either did not know when or how to say “please” and “no sir.” So the parents decided to discipline the child. This allegedly led to a, enraged and brutal beating that killed the child. In October 2007, a fisherman found a plastic storage box floating in Galveston bay containing Riley Ann’s body, which had been wrapped in trash bags.

The second case involves Alijah Mullis whose diaper-clad three-month old body was discovered in January 2008 in an isolated area on the eastern end of Galveston Island by a couple cruising for wildlife. The child’s father, Travis Mullis, allegedly dumped the body there after repeatedly stomping on the child’s head, snuffing out its precious life. The child’s mother, Karen Kohberger, said Mullis indicated to her shortly before the child’s death that he was having flashbacks from being sexually abused as a child. (more…)

By Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair

Most people automatically assume that when they board a commercial or chartered bus, they will safely reach their destination. Greyhound and Trailways over a four decade period from the 1940s through the 1970s ingrained that assumption in the American psyche. Before the explosion of air travel in this country in the 1980s, bus travel was considered an economically efficient and fairly comfortable way of traveling across a nation that spans four time zones.

But then another facet of traditional American life began to sour. Bus accidents became more frequent, and increasingly more deadly – especially in Texas whose highways are notoriously crowded with F150s and SUVs, all seemingly in a hurry to get somewhere fast. The following is a list of fatal bus crashes in Texas over the past five years as reported by Associated Press (Aug. 8, 2008):

• February 4, 2003 – A chartered bus carrying a church group crossed a median and collided with an SUV just south of Waco, killing five bus passengers and two SUV passengers and injuring dozens more.
• May 24, 2004 – A chartered casino bus traveling down Interstate 10 in Southeast Texas returning Texas residents from Louisiana collided with an 18-wheeler, killing one bus passenger and sending numerous others to area hospitals.
• September 23, 2005 – As Hurricane Rita barreled toward the Texas coast, a bus carrying 44 nursing home residents and staffers was rocked by a series of explosions after one of its wheels caught on fire on Interstate 45 near Dallas, killing 23 residents. The National Transportation Safety Board in 2007 faulted the bus company and a federal vehicle safety agency in the fire.
• October 25, 2005 – A tour bus crossed Interstate 35 in San Antonio after tire blew out and crashed into two 18-wheelers, killing the bus driver and injuring two bus passengers and the driver of one of the trucks.
• March 30, 2006 – A bus carrying a Beaumont high school girls’ soccer team to a playoff game in Humble rolled onto its side on Highway 90 near Devers, killing two of the teenage girls.
• January 2, 2008 – A chartered bus from Mexico on its way to Houston rolled onto its side near Victoria and was struck by a pickup truck, killing one person and injuring dozens of others.

Then on August 8, 2008 the unspeakable happened. A chartered bus carrying a Vietnamese Catholic church group from Houston to a religious festival in Missouri crashed onto its side into a guard railing after an illegal re-treaded tire blew out on a freeway in Sherman, Texas. Seventeen passengers died – fourteen at the scene – and another 40 were injured, many critically. It was a tragedy that should not have happened. The company that owned the bus, Angel Tours, has been cited for a laundry list of safety violations; the driver of the bus has a history of unsafe driving and substance abuse violations; and the bus itself had been declared unsafe to drive outside the state of Texas. (more…)

By Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair

The State of Texas executed two foreign nationals during the week of August 5 and 7, 2008. Both men, Jose Ernesto Medellin and Heliberto Chi, were found guilty of committing brutal murders. There was little doubt about their guilt. Had they not been foreign nationals, their executions would have passed under the Texas execution radar basically unnoticed. This is a sad fact in this great state where executions have become all too common.

But they were foreign nationals and their executions had, and will continue to have, international legal and political implications. The controversy associated with these executions centers on this country’s refusal to honor - if not the intent, the spirit – of its international treaty obligations. The treaty obligation in Medellin’s case involved Vienna Convention which provides that when a person is arrested in a foreign country, the arresting officials have an obligation to inform that person of his/her right to consult with, and seek assistance from, the “consular” of their country. Medellin, a Mexican national, was not advised of his “consular rights” when arrested in Harris County in 1994.

Chi’s case, a Honduran national, involved a different treaty – a 1927 U.S. Bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Consular Rights with Honduras. Unlike the Vienna Convention, the Honduran Bilateral Treaty was “self-executing” – meaning the treaty did not require legislation by the United States Congress to have full force and effect. Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Medellin case that the Vienna Convention was not self-executing and, therefore, did not have automatic effect on federal law in this country because Congress had never passed legislation to give rights guaranteed under the treaty full legal force.

The Vienna Convention became a bone of international contention in 2004 when the International Court of Justice, located in the Hague, issued a decision that said the United States had violated the “consular rights” of 51 Mexican nationals convicted of capital crimes in this country and, therefore, they were entitled to a review of their convictions and death sentences. Although his case was not one of the 51 Mexican nationals involved in the ICJ decision, Medellin’s case became the one that ultimately worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and led to the precedent ruling that the Vienna Convention was not “self executing.” (more…)

Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd Discusses the Tragedy of the John Horn Case and the Implications of Grand Jury No Bill

It was a highly-charged emotional case from the beginning. It had all the social ingredients for stirring controversy: criminals, crime, guns, self-defense, race, and illegal immigrants. It began last November when a 64-year-old Pasadena retiree named Joe Horn saw his neighbor’s home being burglarized by two Hispanic men, Diego Ortiz and Hernando Riascos Torres, who were in the United States illegally(although Horn at the time didn’t know they were Hispanic because of their African-Columbian descent). Horn called 911 to report the crime. He told the 911 dispatcher that he was armed. The dispatcher instructed Horn to stay inside his own residence. Horn ignored those instructions, pointedly telling the dispatcher that he was going to kill the two men.

Whatever his motives, Horn left his residence armed with a shotgun. He confronted the two unarmed men as they walked between his residence and his neighbor’s residence. One of the men, according to news reports, angled in the direction of Horn, who was standing on his porch, before making a dash toward the street in front of Horn’s residence. The other Hispanic man turned away from Horn and fled across the neighbor’s front yard. Horn raised the shotgun and fired one shot that struck the man fleeing toward the street in the back, killing him instantly. Horn turned the shotgun toward the other man and fired two shots, one of which also struck the fleeing man in the back. He continued to run a short distance before collapsing dead.

The case triggered street protests in the Village Grove East subdivision where Horn lives. Those protests were led by community activists Quanell X. The community of Pasadena suddenly found itself the subject of national media attention. This web page posted four blogs (11-29-08, 12-09-07, 12-17-07, and 02-27-08) about the case and the subject of self-defense. Our website quickly discovered that the emotions in the case ran to the extreme – Joe Horn was either a “hero” for killing two “down n’ dirty” criminals or he was a cold blooded murderer who shot two men in the back as they fled.

The problem with extremes is that they never capture the essence of any controversy. They tend only to polarize people, too often along racial and cultural lines as in the Horn case. This was made evident on June 30, 2008 when a Harris County Grand Jury elected not to indict Horn for any criminal offense related to the shootings.  Both extremes were ready with the standard responses. (more…)