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No surprise: Judge's study links school dropouts, criminal activity

By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun, Nov 22, 2006 : 10:01 pm ET

DURHAM -- Saddened by a reported high school dropout rate of 43 percent in Durham, District Judge Craig Brown recently took it upon himself to study the correlation between education and criminal activity in the Bull City.

The results didn't surprise him.

According to the informal survey, more than half of the criminal suspects who appeared before Brown during a three-day period this month had dropped out of school between the 8th and 11th grades.

"Surprise, surprise," Brown said in an interview. "That's what I thought my study would show, but I had no data to back it up before. There's a great difference between thinking something and knowing it."

Brown conceded his survey was unscientific. He merely polled 103 criminal defendants to determine their level of education.

The numbers weren't as far apart as the judge had envisioned.

Fifty-four of the respondents turned out to be school dropouts, while 49 got into legal trouble despite graduating from high school. Sixteen in the latter category had attended college, Brown's survey indicated.

The majority of respondents -- 57 of 103 -- were misdemeanor rather than felony suspects.

Only one was charged with anything as high as a Class B felony, the second most serious level of crime on the books in North Carolina. That person had dropped out of high school in the 11th grade.

Class B offenses include first-degree rape and second-degree murder.

The bulk of Brown's felony respondents -- 32 -- fell within the much lower Class H category that takes in crimes like arranging dogfights, domestic abuse and possession of stolen goods.

Brown said he believed gang recruitment had much to do with the local high school dropout rate -- 43 percent -- which is 3 points higher than the state's rate of 40 percent.

"Dropping out of school leads to gang, drug and overall crime problems," the judge added.

"The powers that be need to put their money where their mouth is," he said. "There has been a lot of talk about the gang problem here, but not enough resources have been applied to it."

However, Brown said he was encouraged by an imminent program to vastly expand truancy courts in Durham. The expansion will be made possible by allowing two dozen or more regular lawyers to preside over the special courts in addition to district-level judges, of which Durham has only six, with another on the way in January.

http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-791669.html

Lawyers say condemned man delusional

By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun, Nov 22, 2006 : 11:31 pm ET

DURHAM -- Death row inmate Guy Tobias LeGrande apparently couldn't care less about the efforts of two Durham lawyers working feverishly to save his life, which the state plans to snuff out by lethal injection Dec. 1.

The attorneys, Jay Ferguson and Duke University law professor Jim Coleman, say LeGrande is so delusional that he expects an automatic pardon from his 1996 murder-for-hire conviction in Stanly County.

He also believes he is due money -- and lots of it -- because state officials falsely imprisoned him, according to Ferguson and Coleman.

Ferguson, who has done appellate work for years, said he has never before encountered such a situation.

"He won't talk to me," the veteran attorney said of LeGrande. "He doesn't think he needs me. He thinks he is either being pardoned or has already been pardoned. It's too bad. There are a lot of facts in his case that point to innocence. But it's hard to investigate them without his cooperation."

Coleman said that he, too, was shunned when he last met with LeGrande.

"He decided I was working for the prosecutor, and he went berserk," said Coleman. "He wanted me out of there. He was banging on the walls. The suddenness and violence of his reaction was startling."

The way Ferguson and Coleman see it, such delusional behavior is evidence of a mental illness that should suffice to gain gubernatorial clemency or a judicial stay of execution for LeGrande. They say the illness was present during LeGrande's trial a decade ago, prompting him to fire his lawyers and represent himself with unparalleled amateurishness.

For weeks, the Durham attorneys have scurried around the state in their bid to save LeGrande, remaining motivated despite their client's lack of helpfulness.

A clemency petition was presented to the governor on Nov. 14. New legal documents have been filed. Now, Ferguson and Coleman are prepared to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Someone's got to stand up for people like Guy LeGrande," said Ferguson. "He doesn't understand he is going to be executed, but I do. He fully believes he has been pardoned, is going to be released and will receive a large sum of money from the government."

According to Ferguson, LeGrande already has written his family with the news, "I'm getting out soon."

Ferguson and Coleman received court appointments for their work on behalf of LeGrande, who has been diagnosed as psychotic, reportedly suffering from a "delusional disorder with grandiose and persecutory delusions."

Another last-ditch mental evaluation is now in progress.

LeGrande was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die for the slaying of Ellen Munford -- a killing that was arranged by the woman's estranged husband, Tommy Munford.

Evidence indicated that Tommy Munford plotted to kill his spouse for insurance money and hired LeGrande to pull the trigger.

The husband was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and is eligible for parole next year.

Although he fired his lawyers and represented himself at trial, LeGrande had standby counselors in the courtroom. But he ignored them and didn't let them participate in the proceedings, saying he received his guidance from Oprah Winfrey and Dan Rather.

When the standby lawyers filed a written motion suggesting LeGrande was mentally ill and legally incompetent, LeGrande tore up the paperwork.

A judge allowed the case to go forward anyway.

LeGrande wore a Superman T-shirt on most days and verbally harassed jurors, telling them to kiss his behind and calling them the anti-Christ, according to Ferguson, who was not one of the standby attorneys.

There was no physical evidence to link LeGrande to the murder.

"Nothing," said Ferguson. "Not a hair, not a fingerprint, not a drop of blood. Absolutely nothing."

Ferguson said only two witnesses were able to incriminate LeGrande.

One was Tommy Munford, the estranged husband who plotted his wife's murder and later received a generous plea bargain.

"He's certainly biased," Ferguson said.

The other witness was a woman named Barbara Taylor, who testified that LeGrande had confessed to her. She reportedly received $3,500 in reward money.

Racial issues play a center-stage role in the clemency efforts being mounted by Ferguson and Coleman.

LeGrande is black but had an all-white jury. The Munfords were white.

The prosecution of LeGrande was spearheaded by District Attorney Ken Honeycutt, who succeeded in getting at least three other black men sentenced to death by all-white juries in the 1990s.

Honeycutt gained notoriety for wearing a gold lapel pin shaped like a noose, and for awarding such pins to assistant prosecutors who won death-penalty cases.

However, two of Honeycutt's death verdicts were overturned because he allegedly withheld critical evidence.

All of which leads Coleman, the Duke law professor, to think LeGrande might not be a killer.

"His claim of innocence is not frivolous," Coleman said in an interview. "It is possible he really is innocent."

It is true that LeGrande knew about the plot to murder Ellen Munford, Coleman acknowledged.

But that was only because Tommy Munford "shopped around" the idea to various people -- including LeGrande -- as he sought a triggerman, the professor said.

So LeGrande's knowledge of the scheme was not conclusive evidence of guilt, Coleman added.

At one point, LeGrande offered to tell a Stanly County newspaper who murdered Ellen Munford if the paper would pay him $50,000, reports indicated.

"He clearly was trying to make money for what he knew," said Coleman. "But is that plausible behavior for a person who actually did the killing? It doesn't prove he didn't do it, but it does raise questions. Those questions should have been investigated."

http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-791730.html