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Oklahoma pharmacist sentenced to life for killing would-be robber

July 11, 2011

An Oklahoma pharmacist has been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for first-degree murder in the shooting death of a teenager who tried to rob the south Oklahoma City pharmacy where he worked.

Fifty-nine-year-old Jerome Ersland was sentenced Monday after Oklahoma County District Judge Ray Elliott rejected a defense motion to suspend the sentence.

Ersland had no reaction and said nothing as the sentence was handed down. As he left the courtroom, he responded to a reporter’s shouted question by calling the sentence “an injustice of a monumental proportion.”

A jury convicted Ersland and recommended the life with the possibility of parole sentence for the May 2009 shooting of 16-year-old Antwun Parker. Defense attorney Irven Box said the conviction and sentence will be appealed.

Article: MSNBC.com

Texas’ Innocent Prisoners Are Getting Compensated, and Their Lawyers Want in On the Deal

On June 29, in Judge Ken Molberg’s courtroom, attorneys representing Steven Phillips and Kevin Glasheen argued over money, which is what attorneys often do when they clash in courtrooms. At stake: around $1 million, which Glasheen says he’s owed by Phillips per an agreement they made three years ago. Phillips doesn’t want to pay the money. He earned every penny, he says—by serving 24 years in prison for a sexual assault and robbery he didn’t commit.

The hearing before Molberg came in a lawsuit Phillips filed two years ago against Glasheen, the Lubbock-based attorney who loaned Phillips a few thousand dollars in ’08 to help the Dallas man get back on his feet, and who now says he’s owed 25 percent of the $4 million the state will compensate Phillips for his time spent behind bars.

Phillips was convicted in 1982 based largely on eyewitness testimony from a victim in one of a string of 11 incidents in which local women were raped or sexually molested, according to the Innocence Project, which assisted Phillips in obtaining DNA testing on biological evidence from the crime. The tests cleared Phillips and implicated another man, a convicted rapist who died in prison while Phillips was incarcerated.

Article: Dallas Observer News

Bodies of 11 found outside Mexico City

Mexico City (CNN) — The bodies of 10 men and a woman were found Friday afternoon on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City, a Valle de Chalco municipal government official said in a statement.

The public security official, Javier Garcia, said the victims — all of whom were in handcuffs and bound with tape — had been shot.

Army soldiers were assigned to secure the site in the colony Xico Tercera Seccion. Personnel from the attorney general’s office initiated an investigation, he said.

The state-run Notimex news agency, citing local police, said that authorities also found in the carnage a woman clinging to life. She was taken to a hospital, where she was being guarded by soldiers and police.

Article: CNN

Federal report blasts probation officers’ handling of Garrido case

(CNN) — A report from federal judicial authorities released this week blasted federal probation officers in northern California for their handling of the case of Phillip Garrido, who admitted to kidnapping and sexually assaulting Jaycee Dugard over 18 years.

Garrido was a registered sex offender when authorities located Dugard and her two children, who he’d fathered, nearly two years ago in an Antioch, California, home.

James Ware — the chief federal judge for northern California, thus putting him in charge of the probation department there — on Thursday released what was once a confidential report from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. It found no evidence that officers charged with tracking Garrido over the years would have found Dugard by searching the premises. Still, the report called the treatment of Garrido “clearly substandard” and symptomatic of larger problems.

“The Garrido case is a significant reflection of the deficient practices in the probation office in the northern district of California,” the report said. “The office had a track record of inadequate supervision (and) serious deficiencies in operations.”

Article: CNN

Kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard talks about her 18 years of terror

(CNN) — U.S. kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard, who gave birth to two children during her 18 years in captivity, said she did what she had to do to survive.

During a wide-ranging interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer that aired Sunday night, Dugard opened up about her experiences at the hands of her captors, Nancy and Philip Garrido.

Dugard was just 11 years old when she was abducted in 1991 from the street in front of her South Lake Tahoe, California, home. The Garridos held her and her daughters in a hidden compound of sheds and tarpaulins until she was found in 2009.

Dugard is now 31 and working to build a new life, one in which she and her children are finally free.

“There’s a switch that I had to shut off,” she told Sawyer. “Just went someplace else.”

Article: CNN