DEL.ICIO.USTHE STATE vs. BRIAN GENE NICHOLS
Jury hears tape of courthouse shootings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, September 22, 2008
Just seven minutes into the prosecutor’s opening statement today, jurors in the Brian Nichols murder trial were brought chillingly back to the bedlam in another courtroom that day in March 2005 when Nichols was being tried for rape.
A tape recording made by court reporter Julie Ann Brandau in Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes’ courtroom captured the drama of the gunshots that killed her and Barnes.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Lead prosecutor Kellie Hill addresses the court during opening arguments on Monday. Behind her are photos of the people who were killed in March 2005.
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Played by lead prosecutor Kellie Hill, the tape at first began with what Hill called a moment of “regular courtroom tranquility” of a lawyer’s argument to the court — until the first BANG rang out.
Then, the apparent confusion of stunned civil lawyers and a second shot, four seconds later. Shrieking erupted.
“DON’T HURT ME DON’T HURT ME,” came the breathless plea of a woman. “HELP DON”T HURT ME.”
The screams of Barnes’s staff attorney were recorded as Brandau fell across her, fatally shot through the head.
Hill said Barnes had been shot in the head from behind. As the lawyers in the rape case fled the courtroom, they had to step over Barnes’ body.
In Monday’s courtroom audience, Brandau’s daughter, Christina Scholte, listened to the shots and the shrieking. She wept into her hands.
Brian G. Nichols faces a 54-count indictment, including four murder charges, for the March 11, 2005 courthouse shootings. Facing the death penalty, he has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Hill described the courtroom ambush that day as the work of a “cold-blooded, conniving, evil and extremely, extremely dangerous mind” of a desperate man who feared he was facing conviction at his second trial for rape.
Hill said the prosecution in the rape case had planned to call its last witness against Nichols for rape that day and jury deliberations were upon him.
“He knew something had to be done,” Hill said.
She told the court in her opening statement that Nichols had got to Barnes’ courtroom after savagely beating his guard, sheriff’s Deputy Cynthia Hall, after she took off his handcuffs so he could change into street clothes for trial. Hall was beaten so badly, Hill said, that an emergency room doctor thought she had been shot in the head. Hall, who suffered brain damage, may not be able to testify, Hill said.
After the shootings, Nichols didn’t flee the courtroom immediately, Hill said.
Instead he returned to Barnes’ chambers where he had tied up the judge’s staff and a visiting lawyer before the gunfire erupted. Hill said Nichols was looking to settle one last score.
“He looked into that room but luckily… the victim in the rape case, was late,” Hill said.
When Nichols made his exit down a staircase to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, he fired his gun into the air to create pandemonium, Hill said.
“But Nichols, she said, didn’t flee. He waited.
When people started running, he didn’t,” Hill said. “Instead he turned around and pointed those guns and when Sgt (Hoyt) Teasley came out that door, he fired four times. He ambushed him.”
The prosecutor then went over what she described were Nichols’ deliberate steps to mislead police by committing multiple carjackings before hiding the last car in the parking garage where he had taken it from its owner and then taking MARTA to Buckhead.
In Buckhead, she said, Nichols tried to kidnap another woman so he could use her apartment as a hiding place. But after taking her to the apartment, he was surprised by the woman’s boyfriend, who was already inside the apartment. The two fought in the hallway before Nichols fled, Hill said.
It was that flight that led him to David Wilhelm, an off-duty federal agent, who was doing tile work at a house he was renovating, Hill said. Nichols shot Wilhelm, paralyzing him, and then picked his pockets and stole his truck as he lay dying, the prosecutor said.
He drove to Gwinnett where “he met someone as smart as he was,” Hill said.
That person, Ashley Smith, was kidnapped by Nichols at gunpoint but “she gave him clothes, she gave him drugs, she cooked for him and she did whatever it took to stay alive.”
Smith tricked Nichols into believing he could trust her and let Smith leave to see her daughter, Hill said. Smith called police. Lead defense lawyer Henderson Hill tried to make Hill’s vivid opening statement irrelevant by focusing on Nichols’ mental health, saying that his delusions were true.
“Smart is not the question,” Henderson Hill said. “It is how the mind processes information.”
The lawyer said that Nichols was a man who started going downhill mentally as his relationship with his former girlfriend, whom he was later charged with raping, unraveled.
The defense lawyer, a nationally known death-penalty litigator from Charlotte, described Nichols’ relationship with the former girlfriend as “a loving relationship.”
The defense lawyer acknowledged to jurors that it is difficult to explain that Nichols was insane, suffering from a delusional disorter at the time of the killings, when he looked so calm and together today, dressed in a sharp brown wool suit, white shirt and brown tie — the very picture of stability.
“It is a challenge,” he said.
——
In earlier developments, the Nichols murder trial lost its first juror today.
Juror #17 wrote the court that he had strong feelings about Nichols and asked to be excused for “emotional,” “mental” and “dental” reasons.
The tooth excuse was not explained.
But none of the excuses impressed Superior Court James Bodiford.
The judge admonished the 30-something man about shirking his civic duty — and quickly let him know why he would still feel the pain of jury duty but would do so solo.
“It is sort of like being out in the battlefield and deserting — you leave everybody else to do the work,” Bodiford told the juror who tried to escape duty on the cusp of trial. “You are a shadow juror. You still have the same rules…. You have to wear your juror badge every day.”
The no-nonsense judge put the juror in the judicial equivalent of high-school detention.
He required the juror to attend the Nichols trial — which is expected to last until Christmas — and sit in the audience but he won’t be able to participate in deciding Nichols’ fate.
“There is no such thing as quitting the case,” Bodiford told the jury shortly after swearing them in at 10:51 a.m. in explaining why one of its number wasn’t in the box. “He will be fed lunch just like you will but he is not going to be in the same room.”
The judge also cleared the courtroom audience of everyone except families of the victims, District Attorney Paul Howard, Nichols’ family, assorted members of the defense and prosecution teams, a pool television cameraman and a pool newspaper photographer.
In a video, the judge read the 54-count indictment to the jury.
At 11:12 a.m, Nichols, 36, officially entered his plea: not guilty by reason of insanity.
Opening statements are expected to begin after lunch and expected to take most of the afternoon.
Nichols’ defense team moved again today to delay the trial but Bodiford refused.
“It is no surprise to the lawyers and to any observers that I am denying the continuance,” Bodiford said. “There has got to be a deadline… and we have reached our deadline.”
Nichols’ trial is being held at Atlanta Municipal Court, a few blocks from the county courthouse where he escaped his rape trial on March 11, 2005.
Every seat was taken in the small sixth-floor courtroom as the proceedings began. Nichols’ parents sat a few feet from their son, while across the aisle were several relatives of the four people killed during his escape and rampage. Some had hugged and shed quiet tears as they entered the courtroom.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the killing of Judge Rowland Barnes, court stenographer Julie Ann Brandau, Fulton deputy Hoyt Keith Teasley and agent David Wilhelm of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, all of whom were shot during Nichols’ escape while on trial for rape.
Moore, in asking for a delay, said Nichols’ team had not reviewed hundreds of hours of tape recordings of Nichols’ phone conversations while in jail or interviewed “a significant number” of what he described as the state’s 600 witnesses.
Lead prosecution attorney Kellie Hill countered that the defense has a list of state witnesses and it is “significantly” less than the 600 Moore cited.
“We believe they have had years to review the discovery in this case and prepare for this trial,” said Hill.
Of the witnesses to be called, she said the “The state planned to use only a few number of those calls, and we have provided the defense a list of those call we intended to use.”
Moore, who joined the defense team last spring, said it had made clear to the court that it needed several months to prepare properly. Moore last spring had asked Bodiford to delay the trial until January, which the judge denied.
The trial was delayed in 2007 when Senior Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller, who first had the case, delayed jury selection for more than a year in an attempt to force the state to release more money for the defense, which had spent well-above $1.2 million at that time.
A jury of six black women, two white women, two black men, one white man and one Asian man are hearing the case. They were selected after a nine-week process in which more than 240 prospective jurors were questioned.
Bodiford, a Cobb County jurist appointed after Fuller stepped down, has said he hopes for a verdict by Christmas.
Bodiford, having heard defense complaints during jury selection that there was a “circus-like atmosphere” in the court, on Monday morning laid down rules about media coverage. He denied a defense plea to abandon a second, remotely operated, camera in the courtroom.
But he said that while the media is allowed to have cameras, anybody in the audience who tried to take pictures with cell phones would be dealt with severely.
“They would go to jail, and it would be in a Marietta minute,” said Bodiford.
Georgia taxpayers are paying to defend Nichols, to prosecute him, to protect him and to house him. Some estimates are that it will ultimately cost taxpayers at least $5 million to prosecute and defend Nichols.
Already Fulton County has spent almost $954,000. The county also cancelled a $376,000 debt the city of Atlanta owed for court services in exchange for use of the entire sixth floor of the Municipal Court.
Barnes’ widow recently won a $5.1 million lawsuit against Fulton County for her husband’s death in his courtroom that fateful day. Brandau’s daughter was awarded a $5.2 million settlement a few days ago.
And by the time the trial is over, Fulton County will have spent at least another $118,534 just for juror expenses and more than $151,000 for overtime for deputies assigned to the trial. Fulton is expecting to spend even more because the county is now picking up the expense of one of Nichols’ four attorneys and there are several months of billable hours not yet worked.
At one County Commission meeting in July, the county manager warned another $1.8 million may be needed.
Controversies surrounding its expenses and delays may have been the death-knell of a state system that had just been created at the time of the crimes to eliminate the inequities of a hodge-podge of indigent defense systems.
“This is a tragic case that comes along once every 50 years,” said Stephen Bright, who teaches law at Georgetown and Yale Universities.
“It’s too bad it couldn’t be handled in a way that didn’t result in consequences for the judiciary and the representation of poor people,” said Bright, a veteran death penalty defense attorney.
The financial — and political — drain of the case has crippled, and maybe destroyed the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, said Bright and Michael Mears, another lawyer who previously headed the council.
Mears recalls that he had “several heated discussions” over state funding with legislators who “want to use the Nichols case to destroy the indigent defense system because of how much it’s costing and how much we should have not been paying for this defense.”
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