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Old May 26th, 2011 #10
Paulavt
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Join Date: Aug 2009
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Hearing dates set in motions for new trials in torture slayings

Quote:
Using one of Knoxville's most closely watched cases as a backdrop, Knox County's chief judge on Friday delivered a rare direct message to a public that has witnessed the fall of one of East Tennessee's most high-profile judges.

"We will do our jobs," presiding Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz said in a direct address to the community. "We are here to do what our oath says: to do justice."

The site of her address was the courtroom where former Judge Richard Baumgartner presided over a laundry list of high-profile cases in his 19 years on the bench. The backdrop was a hearing in one of those that drew watchers from across the nation and beyond - the January 2007 torture slayings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23. The issue was what happens now that Baumgartner has confessed to buying and ingesting hundreds of opiate-based painkillers from a felon under probation in his court.

The key question? What impact, if any, will his nearly yearlong illegal drug use have on the cases he handled? If defense attorneys raise concerns about the validity of their clients' convictions and sentencings, it will be up to state appellate courts to ferret that out in the lion's share of cases Baumgartner handled from November 2009 to September 2010, the period during which he was procuring pills from a street dealer.

But there remains a handful of cases that are caught in limbo between convictions at trial and required hearings that test the legal validity of those trials before appeals can be launched, and those decisions had remained in Baumgartner's hands. Among those cases are pending motions for new trials for the four suspects convicted in the slayings of Christian and Newsom.


Leibowitz sought Friday to reassure not only the public but the families of Christian and Newsom that the wheels of justice, temporarily derailed by Baumgartner's guilty plea earlier this month, are back on the tracks.

Joined by fellow Judge Bob McGee and Special Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood, who has been handling Baumgartner's docket since he abruptly stepped down in late January amidst the probe, Leibowitz said she and McGee initially pondered divvying up the four defendants' cases. Blackwood, who is retired, is routinely called upon to handle cases throughout the state when a sitting judge has a conflict, and she and McGee feared he could not undertake what will be an enormous task. However, the state Supreme Court has assured the judges that Blackwood will be kept free to take on the Christian/Newsom case, she said.

"The situation we find ourselves in is uncommon," she said. "We have a lot of decisions to make in these and the other cases as well. Because I couldn't figure out how else to put it, when the most recent unpleasantness began in early February of this year, the three of us began - along with our capital case attorney Miss (Susan) Jones, who has been most helpful to all of us - an evaluation of what we needed to do to see to it that these cases were done in a prompt and efficient manner."

In order to decide whether convicts Letalvis Cobbins, Lemaricus Davidson, George Thomas and Vanessa Coleman received constitutionally sound trials under Baumgartner, Blackwood will have to review thousands of pages of transcripts for not only all four trials, but also a dozen or so motions hearings in the run-ups to those trials, which spanned from August 2009 to May 2010.

He's already hard at work, he said.

"Over the last several weeks, I've had the opportunity to read most of (the Cobbins' trial) transcript," he said.

Blackwood made it clear that he would broker no further delay in deciding whether new trials should be granted, setting firm hearing dates and warning defense attorneys that if they intend to use Baumgartner's legal woes to attack the validity of their clients' convictions, they should not tarry.

"(This) should be done expeditiously," he said.

He set the following hearing dates in the motions for new trials: Cobbins, June 9; Davidson, Sept. 8; Thomas, Oct. 6; and Coleman, Dec. 1.

McGee and Leibowitz will be handling the remaining five of Baumgartner's cases still lingering post-trial. Those include the conviction of William Norman Johnson in a fatal shooting at the Knoxville Center mall.

So far, none of the four defendants in the fatal carjacking has mentioned Baumgartner's legal woes in court filings, and Leibowitz noted that the former judge's guilty plea to official misconduct does not automatically call into question the soundness of his legal rulings.

The families of Christian and Newsom said after Friday's hearing that they are relieved the cases can now move forward.

"We're in the fifth year, and we have no resolution yet," said Newsom's father, Hugh Newsom.

Davidson is on death row. Cobbins and Thomas are serving life terms with no possibility of parole. Coleman, the only one of the four to be convicted of lesser charges of facilitating murder, is serving a 53-year prison term.

Baumgartner escaped jail time and, if he doesn't run afoul of the terms of his diversionary sentence, will keep his pension. However, the state Supreme Court has ordered the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility, which polices attorneys, to launch its own probe. It is a move that could cost Baumgartner his law license.

Meanwhile, attorneys interested in winning appointment from Gov. Bill Haslam to Baumgartner's bench have until April 4 to apply. The state's Judicial Nominating Commission will hold public interviews April 26 and send three names to Haslam for consideration.