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| Death penalty trial opens in prison-gang killing |
| By St. Louis Post-Dispatch |
| Published: 09/09/2003 |
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The first federal death penalty trial in Southern Illinois since at least 1972 has all the elements of a prison movie drama: gang-ordered attacks, knives hidden inside body cavities and a racially motivated murder. The trial begins today in court in Benton, Ill. Three white-supremacist inmates at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., are accused of killing a black inmate from a rival gang in 1999. They face the death penalty, which isn't uncommon in Illinois and Missouri state courts but is nearly unheard of in federal districts such as Southern Illinois. The district hasn't had a federal death penalty trial since the Supreme Court decided in 1976 to lift a ban on capital punishment imposed four years earlier. Today also happens to be the release date for the accused ringleader, David M. Sahakian, 47, who was due to be set free after completing a 15-year sentence on a conviction in California for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He has been denied bond because of the murder trial. Prosecutors accuse Sahakian, known - among several aliases - as 'Freddie the Fishhook,' of orchestrating multiple attacks on black inmates and ultimately the murder of one, Terry L. Walker. An indictment describes Sahakian as a 'shot-caller' for the Aryan Brotherhood, an organized gang pervasive through the federal prison system. Two of his associates are charged with carrying out the murder: Richard S. McIntosh, 41, convicted of bank robbery in Oklahoma and given a 34-year sentence; and Carl Knorr, 40, convicted of armed bank robbery in Florida and sentenced to 15 years. The prison in Marion is a high-security lockup designed to hold some of the nation's toughest federal criminals. A feud there between the Aryan Brotherhood and black inmates associated with a Washington-area gang called the D.C. Blacks began in 1997 after a brawl in a recreation yard. Prosecutors say Sahakian drafted hit lists of black inmates, and that his underlings attacked at least five who survived before Walker was stabbed to death May 18, 1999. The indictment says McIntosh stabbed Walker while Knorr held him from behind. The day after the murder, prison officials found homemade knives made of metal and plastic and fashioned from tools like screwdrivers concealed in the rectums of five Aryan Brotherhood members or associates, including Sahakian. The trial is expected to last up to three months. Jury selection alone may take two to three weeks. If any of the three is convicted, the trial will move into a death penalty phase. It allows a jury to hear a wider range of evidence than in the guilt phase, such as any abuse the defendants faced as children or their past convictions, said William Schroeder, a law professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and an expert on federal law. Because of the gang-related nature of the crime, the U.S. Marshals Service has beefed up security at Benton, in an older courthouse that sits near the town's main thoroughfare. |
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