DEL.ICIO.USProsecution rests its case against Nichols
Defense plans to call his ex-girlfriend as first witness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Prosecutors concluded their 54-count case against Brian Nichols Tuesday afternoon with autopsy photos of his four victims.
The prosecution took 17 days and 76 witnesses to present its evidence that Nichols killed the four after escaping from a holding cell at the Fulton County Courthouse on March 11, 2005.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Attorney Penny Marshall hands a letter to a GBI handwriting expert Brian McVicker during McVicker’s testimony Tuesday.
• Trial photos: Sentencing 1 | 2 | Closing arguments | Video• More photos: Penalty phase | Verdict
• Weeks in court: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
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• Interactive graphic: The 2005 shootings
• Video: Nichols' confession
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Kellie Hill, lead prosecutor, asked Superior Court Judge James Bodiford whether he had any questions before ending her case.
After Bodiford said he had none, one of Nichols’ attorneys, Josh Moore, moved for a mistrial — saying the question left the impression the judge was satisfied with the state’s case.
Bodiford dismissed the suggestion the prosecutor’s question was prejudicial.
“I don’t think it gave the impression that I am putting the seal of approval on the state’s case,” the judge said. “The defense can do it at the end of their case if it makes them feel better.”
Defense lawyers then prepared to call their first witness to prove their contention that while their client was definitely an insane killer, he was not a murderer because a paranoid delusion caused him to shoot Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Hoyt Teasley and David Wilhelm, an off-duty U.S. Custom’s agent.
To do that the defense plans seek the testimony of Nichols’ long-time girlfriend, the woman whose rape charges would have put him in prison. When Nichols faced that reality, he overpowered his guard at the Fulton County Courthouse, took her gun and went on his rampage.
The witness, who requested anonymity, dated Nichols for seven years before permanently ending the relationship in July 2004 after Nichols informed her he had impregnated another woman. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not generally identify victims of sexual assaults.
After his arrest on charges he killed four people, Nichols blamed her for putting him on the path of destruction that culminated with the March 11, 2005, courthouse shootings. He contended she had started dating a pastor at the Gwinnett County church the two had helped build.
Nichols has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
On Monday, the former girlfriend asked Superior Court Judge James Bodiford to seal several documentes from public view — a four-page report from the counselor she and Nichols visited at Southern Christian Counseling, a one-page email she wrote to him around the time of their breakup and 10-pages from her private journal.
Bodiford denied her request that the items be sealed, reminding her attorney that they were evidence in a public, death-penalty trial.
Continuing his testimony Tuesday, Brian McVicker, a handwriting expert for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, told of escape plans in letters he said Nichols wrote to a Connecticut woman in 2006.
The letters, this time introduced by Nichols’ defense team, outlined escape plans and possible hideouts sites in Philadelphia and Myrtle Beach, S.C.
It also included a shopping list in which Nichols instructed the woman, Lisa Meneguzzo, to take to a Lowe’s Home Improvement Store.
The list included.
• Circular saw with a steel cutting blade.
• Masonry drilling bit. “Just the drilling bit, not the drill.”
• Handheld masonry saw.
• Handheld saw for cutting nails.
Nichols allegedly corrupted one of his guards, David Ramsey, at the Fulton County jail, and mentions Ramsey in previous letters as a conduit for contraband.
Ramsey, who no longer works for the Fulton County sheriff’s office, claimed Meneguzzo had asked him for help in the escape plot, but he was responsible only for smuggling a cellphone to Nichols and keeping it charged for him, according to an Associated Press story in January.
Meneguzzo claimed she paid Ramsey $300 to $500 every month or so for an unspecified time, the AP reported. After Ramsey resigned, another deputy who was dating Tamela Hysten, a former paralegal on Nichols’ defense team, became the main conduit for smuggling information to Nichols, the news service reported.
Meneguzzo claimed that she gave Hysten three wire payments of $500 to give to the other deputy and also gave Hysten other unspecified payments and a blank check. Meneguzzo told investigators that Hysten also gave Nichols pages from a book that were about escape and evasion.
Hysten denied all the allegations in news reports last January.
On Tuesday, pages from the book were shown to jurors.
The book talked about spy tradecraft including “dead drops” for leaving messages and packages, “wilderness protocol,” for surviving and moving in the wild, Morris code, “trail markings” or secure blazes, “covert signals,” and radio services, such as the Family Radio Service, for communication.
“We will be together soon, trust me,” Nichols wrote to Meneguzzo.
Nichols’ defense team has spent much of its time during the prosecution’s case introducing the jury to terms like “grandiosity,” which refers to a person having unrealistic or inflated views of their own abilities or the stature and respect they deserve. The defense contends that Nichols suffered from paranoid delusions about being persecuted by the justice system on rape charges. His lawyers implied by introducing the book chapters and letters that Nichols thought he had the capacity of the protagonists in “Prison Break,” the Fox series about a mastermind who breaks himself and his brother out of a maximum-security prison and eludes federal agents and covert operatives pursuing them as they attempt to prove their innocence.
