 |
Michael Ainsworth / DMN
A sheriff's deputy escorts Chante Mallard into the courtroom on the first day of her murder trial at the 371st District Court at the Tarrant County Justice Center.Posted on 06/23/2003 2:51:13 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Mallard pleads not guilty to murder
06/23/2003
FORT WORTH, Texas - A former nurse's aide smoked pot, took ecstasy and drank heavily in the hours before she hit a homeless man and drove home while he was lodged in her windshield, prosecutors and defense attorneys told jurors as her murder trial began Monday.
Chante Jawan Mallard, 27, faces life in prison if convicted. She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, tampering with evidence, before attorneys began their opening statements on the murder charge.
Although she had taken drugs, Mallard could have stopped at a nearby fire or police station or called an ambulance after she hit Gregory Biggs on a highway in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2001, prosecutor Christy Jack said.
Michael Ainsworth / DMN A sheriff's deputy escorts Chante Mallard into the courtroom on the first day of her murder trial at the 371st District Court at the Tarrant County Justice Center. |
"All of a sudden -- bam -- he was just there," Mallard said in a statement to police, which Jack read to jurors.
Mallard did stop briefly to try and get Biggs off her car, but when she couldn't, she drove about a mile to her home, Jack said. Mallard then called one of her friends to pick her up, Jack said.
She and her friend then went to find Mallard's ex-boyfriend to figure out what to do next. When they couldn't find him, they went back to the house, where Mallard took the friend into the garage, Jack said. By that time, Biggs was dead, still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windshield.
The friend told Mallard to call 911, Jack said.
"Chante refused because she didn't want her parents to know what she'd done and didn't want to go to jail," Jack said.
Defense attorney Jeff Kearney said Mallard was in a drug-induced haze and had been hit in the face with flying glass when the car hit Biggs. He said she doesn't dispute what happened, but it was an accident, not murder.
She was just one exit from her home, so she kept driving with "a body entirely in her car, the head in the floorboard, legs going in directions that no one thought humanely possible. You can't imagine," Kearney said.
He said after Mallard pulled into her garage and lowered the door, she sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologizing to Biggs, who was moaning.
When the friend arrived at the house, Mallard was hysterical and "was blabbing, 'Lord, I'm sorry. What do I do? Lord, I'm sorry. It was an accident. What do it do?"' Kearney said.
Biggs, 37, a former bricklayer who had been living in a homeless shelter, was found dead the next day, his body dumped in a park.
When pictures of Biggs' twisted, bruised and bloody body were shown Monday on a large screen in the courtroom, Mallard looked down, and some jurors grimaced or looked away. Biggs' relatives were not in the room when the photos were displayed.
Mallard's attorney said Clete Jackson, one of two men who pleaded guilty to helping dump Biggs' body, orchestrated moving Biggs to Cobb Park.
Jackson received a 10-year sentence for tampering with evidence. His cousin, Herbert Tyrone Cleveland, received nine years. As part of plea agreements, they were to testify at Mallard's trial.
Police initially said Biggs lived for several days in Mallard's garage, slowly bleeding to death from his multiple fractures and cuts.
But Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, whose left leg was nearly amputated, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit. He could have survived if he had received medical attention, Peerwani said.
When Biggs' body was found in the park, authorities had no leads until four months later, when a tipster said Mallard talked about the incident at a party.
The day after interviewing the tipster in February 2002, police went to Mallard's house with a search warrant.
Detective Don Owings told jurors Monday that after serving the search warrant, he saw the car in the garage with the seats missing and the windshield and rear glass broken. Officers have said they found dark stains on the passenger-side floorboard and burned car seats in her back yard.
Owings testified that 14 officers accompanied him to Mallard’s home. She was not ill-treated, he said, and she understood her rights as she was interrogated.
“She was upset. She had cried some,” he said. “But she allowed me to take the statement.”
Had Mr. Biggs died within an hour or two of his injuries, it would be hard to argue premeditation. I would argue, however, that at some point the woman made a concious decision that she was going to let Mr. Biggs die. Her actions from that point forward should constitute premeditated murder.
To my mind, the only question would be whether one could reasonably assign another aggravating factor to make it capital murder. I would suggest that a jury might find that either a torture or kidnapping aggravating factor applied. A judge might not so decide, but I think a jury would be willing to do everything possible to ensure that woman never sees the free light of day alive.
Do what????????
So am I. But prior to the negligent homicide classification being changed, the max anyone would do for a negligent homicide in Wisconsin would be 5 years (if they were sober; 10 years while drunk)--and under the prior calculation of good time, they'd serve 1/4 of the sentence. And that's the MAX. Nowadays, it's 25 for a negligent homicide (no prior DUIs), 40 with a prior DUI. That's the max--and that's straight time. Until recently, if you kill someone with anything but a car, the penalties were a whole lot less.
She's not being tried on capital murder charges which could bring the death penalty in Texas. Even premeditation isn't sufficient to get a capital murder verdict. It requires additional facts not present here.
The closest you could come to bringing a capital murder charge would be allege that she also kidnapped the victim by not freeing him or getting help. But that's kind of a stretch, too.
I'm not defending her in the least, and this crime was in many ways far more despicable than many capital murders. It's just the way the law is written.
Whatever happened to the original story of the murderer going inside the house, having sex, going back to the garge to talk to the victim who died the next day, not in a "few hours." Did the murderer retract that statement or is that cleaned up by the media as well?
She called a friend to come help HER.....not him.......she and her friend rode around for a couple of hours, trying to find other friends to help HER.
I'm pretty sure that that will strike the jury as her having decided to save herself and let him die.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.