Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel, October 20, 2009
{snip}
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported toxicology results for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
The defense team for the alleged ringleader in a torture slaying tipped its strategic hand Monday with a startling suggestion—this random attack on a Knox County couple may not have been so random after all.
Lemaricus Davidson’s defense attorney, David Eldridge, alluded to this claim in opening statements, telling jurors they would wind up questioning the state’s version of events “at the beginning” of what long has been viewed as a carjacking gone wrong. He did not elaborate.
But co-counsel Doug Trant later followed up with a question posed to slaying victim Channon Christian’s best friend, Kara Sowards, that offered a bit more clarity.
“Would it surprise you to learn (Christian and boyfriend Christopher Newsom) were seen at the Exxon on Cherry Street (before they were slain)?” Trant asked.
Davidson, 28, is standing trial this week on a slew of charges ranging from kidnapping to rape to murder in the January 2007 slayings of Christian, 21, and Newsom, 23. Prosecutors Leland Price and Takisha Fitzgerald have a mountain of forensic proof, including Davidson’s DNA on Christian’s clothing and body; his fingerprints on the couple’s belongings; and his palm print on a trash bag in which Christian’s body was wrapped and stuffed inside a garbage can in Davidson’s Chipman Street home.
But Eldridge told jurors it wasn’t surprising that Davidson’s prints would be on items in his house because he lived there. He intimated that the “gang from Kentucky”—co-defendants Letalvis Cobbins, who was convicted in August, George Thomas and Vanessa Coleman—killed the couple and left behind “all the evidence conveniently to be found in Mr. Davidson’s home.”
{snip}
“You will have real questions about whether Mr. Davidson was even in the Chipman Street house when (Christian) was killed,” Eldridge told jurors.
Trant later quizzed witnesses about the victims’ alleged drug use. He elicited testimony from Newsom’s friend, Josh Anderson, that Anderson and another friend removed marijuana from Newsom’s truck shortly after Newsom went missing. And Trant questioned Sowards about a marijuana pipe in her apartment—she said it wasn’t hers—and a prescription bottle for hydrocodone belonging to another Christian friend found in Christian’s Toyota 4 Runner. Sowards said the friend probably left it there accidentally.
When prosecutors began asking witnesses who lived in the Chipman Street area if they’d ever seen Christian and Newsom in the neighborhood, all said no. But Trant asked one of those witnesses, “You didn’t go there to buy drugs, did you?”
A toxicology report on Christian showed the presence of a small amount of alcohol in her system. Newsom’s results showed the presence of marijuana and amphetamines.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on October 22, 2009)
Comments
Assuming that the defense attorneys are right, I was not aware that being murdered and sexually assaulted were legal punishments for using drugs.
So if the victims went there to buy drugs then the victims deserved to be viciously raped and murdered. That is what the defense is peddling. My words cannot express how angry this type of blaming the victims makes me.
If the victim’s drug use or intoxication were truly a defense to heinous murder, the black population would be all but annihilated by assailants who would then be exonerated, I assure you.
When that black man was drag hanged behind a truck out in Texas they didn’t even worry about the fact that he was out drinking with the white guys that killed him. They didn’t bring up his past life or the fact that he was also and ex-con. The minute he was dead he was just another poor innocent black man being persecuted by the white man.
They should just come out and admit that the only reason most white people ever visit a black neighborhood is to buy drugs. They go to black neighborhoods because that’s where they are sure to find plenty of drugs for sale. You could say it’s the only successful black business venture in the country.
White people should give up drugs and then there would never be a reason to enter a black area ever again.
The tactics these lawyers use is sickening. Even if this couple were two strung out junkies, (which we know they were not) SO WHAT!!?? What does that have to do with ANYTHING? So I guess it is now acceptable in this country to rape, torture and murder any kind of drug user? I don’t care if they found a case of beer and a pound of pot in their car or system, they certainly didn’t deserve this horrific ending. How DARE these lawyers even suggest such a thing, and I hope it back fires on them in a major way.
Didn’t Cobbins and the others admit to the hyjacking anyway? Not to mention Channon’s SUV was found a few blocks away from the house if they had went there to buy drugs they wouldn’t have parked blocks away.
Lawyers trying to spin lies to defend murders and rapists should be jailed with the defendants. Actively trying to twist and promote perjury should be punishable against lawyers as well as witnesses.
The other night I was thinking to myself of what hypothetical situations that get us Whites to wake up collectively.
This is a sickening but typically cynical defense tactic of “blame the victim” that is used in today’s “justice” system. It is ironic that in cases like these - when they imply that White victims who venture into the hood for drugs are “asking for” their gruesome fates - that these attorneys are basically portraying their clients as vicious, uncontrollable beasts to whom rape, murder and torture come second nature.
It implies that Whites going into the ghetto for drugs is akin to intentionally going into a lion’s cage at the zoo and any consequences suffered should be seen as the price of foolishness. Although in the Knoxville case, being mauled to death by a lion would have been more humane than the victims’ treatment at the hands of these black monsters.
Daniel (post #4) writes: “White people should give up drugs and then there would never be a reason to enter a black area ever again”.
One of Bobby Kennedy’s sons died of an overdose after buying narcotics in the Harlem district in New York City, a few years ago. I believe it was a heroin OD.
If i were a juror, this defense would be sinking fast with these tactics.
The defense also says, “You will have real questions about whether Mr. Davidson was even in the Chipman Street house when (Christian) was killed,”
Well the defendant knows weather he was there or not and he has had to have conveyed that to his attorney. So, for this defese attorney to argue it as an open question shows he doesn’t have much faith in what his client tells him.
I have been quite familiar with this nightmarish story for some time now, and the shock never wears off.
“It is ironic that in cases like these - when they imply that White victims who venture into the hood for drugs are “asking for” their gruesome fates - that these attorneys are basically portraying their clients as vicious, uncontrollable beasts to whom rape, murder and torture come second nature”.
Not entirely true. It was the reporter who suggested that by his choice of words; but, ‘uncontrollable beasts’? I think the suggestion here is really, not that blacks are uncontrollable beasts, but that whites who harbor unconscious racial feelings, or who are just a happy white couple who have been drinking too much, should always be aware their words could incite violence among the ‘victims’.
This sort of reminds me of the OJ case. Certain accusations were made.
Goldman had a disease. Nicolle had a disease. Therefore.
Nicolle used drugs. Goldman used drugs. Therefore.
Nicolle was unmarried. Goldman was unmarried. Therefore.
NONE of that stuff was EVER substantiated to my knowledge.
And MAKES NO DIFFERENCE EVEN IS WAS ALL TRUE!! But in the minds of impressionable people, well, guess what!!
Big deal. So the defendants used some reefer. So do many of the law abiding people I know. It’s just a distraction. The defense is trying to lessen the crimes severity due to the victims being “drug abusers”. Ridiculous. Also an old defense that becomes less relevant daily, especially as marijuana laws are (finally) becoming less severe.
“Not entirely true. It was the reporter who suggested that by his choice of words; but, ‘uncontrollable beasts’? I think the suggestion here is really, not that blacks are uncontrollable beasts, but that whites who harbor unconscious racial feelings, or who are just a happy white couple who have been drinking too much, should always be aware their words could incite violence among the ‘victims’.”
The article clearly states that Trant, the defense attorney, engaged in a line of questioning of the victims’ friends that implied that the victims used drugs and were seen at a gas station in the ghetto - clearly trying to set up a scenario, where it was a “drug deal/carjacking gone wrong” instead of a prolonged kidnapping, rape, mutilation and murder session over the period of several days.
And your implication that Newsom and Christian were drunk and stated “words that create violence” during some drug deal seems to agree with this line of thinking - they were innocent yet foolish victims, testing a force of nature, in this case a black’s low self-esteem and propensity for criminal behavior. It lets the murderer off the hook and deflects blame on the victims, or maybe on the situation itself.
It’s an argument that defines the victims as accomplices in their own gruesome demise and the culprits as “uncontrollable beasts” of their own cruel nature.
This line of thinking follows the ‘human diversity’ paradigm being trotted out by lawyers/attorneys all over the US/UK: that vile acts are the norm when the actor is ‘oppressed’ somehow by his or her circumstances. It attempts to place responsibility for the actor upon the victim, because the victim represents ‘all that is wrong with the world’, and is a creature restricting the actor’s ‘rights of self-expression and culture’. And *because* of this belief it is impossible for those seeking to embrace ‘human diversity’ to believe that the murders of whites can be racially motivated, even in such horrific circumstances as these.
