DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 5:11 p.m. September 09, 2008
Sullivan seeks new trial in murder conviction
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Millionaire investor James Sullivan deserves a new trial for the highly publicized 1987 murder-for-hire of his wife, an attorney told the Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday.
A “false and misleading” search warrant littered with “half-truths and material omissions” is grounds to throw out key evidence seized in the case, lawyer Don Samuel said.
Georgia Department of Corrections
James Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2006.
Buckhead socialite Lita Sullivan, 35, was gunned down at her townhouse by a killer bearing roses. James Sullivan fled and was arrested at a resort community on the coast of Thailand 17 years later.
He was convicted in March 2006 of paying a hit man $25,000 to kill his wife. Fulton County prosecutors sought the death penalty, but jurors sentenced Sullivan to life in prison without parole.
Lita Sullivan’s parents, Emory and Jo Ann McClinton, sat in the front row during Tuesday’s hearing. Afterward, they said they hope the court will reject Sullivan’s appeal.
“At some point, you feel this is over,” Jo Ann McClinton said. “You try to get past the point of it hurting every day.”
“Everybody knows he’s guilty,” said Emory McClinton, a board member of the state Department of Transportation. “But we continue this charade.”
Samuel told the justices a search warrant used to seize evidence from James Sullivan’s Palm Beach, Fla., mansion warrants a new trial.
The warrant was prepared by an FBI agent who relied, partly, on a confidential informant named Johnny Austin Turner. The warrant correctly noted that Turner had previously failed an FBI polygraph exam, Samuel said. But it did not note that Turner, then 38, had been arrested 38 times, many times for forgery and fraud.
Turner even led police to believe he could get the murder weapon, so they took him out of jail and had him wear a hidden microphone. When they released him on the street, he fled. Turner was later arrested and convicted three weeks before the search warrant for Sullivan’s home was presented to a judge, Samuel said. The warrant made no mention of that.
“Why bother having search warrants in the first place?” Samuel asked.
Fulton prosecutor Anna Green Cross told the justices that Samuel was trying to put the FBI agent on trial, not Sullivan, “the man who hired a hit man to kill his wife 21 years ago.”
The warrant included information that had been independently corroborated by investigators, Cross said.
Also, if the information supplied by Turner is excised from the warrant, Cross added, “there is still overwhelming probable cause to search this man’s home.”
Investigators used the warrant to find Sullivan’s meticulously kept diaries, which documented a meeting with a man who helped arrange the murder and to establish Sullivan was having an affair. Police also found financial documents inside the 17,000-square-foot home that prosecutors used to help prove the motive for the killing.
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