Death row inmate argues for new trial
PANAMA CITY — When Walter Smith met Robert Bailey after the former had been arrested for killing a Panama City Beach Police officer, Smith didn’t suspect Bailey was mentally retarded. But as his appointed defense attorney, Smith had his client tested anyway.
Bailey was able to speak and write capably, but there were things in Bailey’s past that prompted Smith to have his IQ tested.
“I knew that he ate paint chips, fell out of a window, drank gasoline,” Smith testified Wednesday. Smith was called as a witness in Bailey’s post conviction relief hearing. Bailey, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for the shooting of Sgt. Kevin Kight on Front Beach Road during Spring Break in 2005, is asking for a new trial because of mistakes he claims his attorney made during the trial. His trial attorney was John Jay Gontarek, who also testified Wednesday.
Bailey is now being represented by Clyde Taylor, who alleges that Gontarek’s trial strategy was so deficient that Bailey should be given a new trial.
Assistant State Attorney Larry Basford, who prosecuted Bailey, countered that different lawyers will employ different strategies; just because Gontarek didn’t follow the strategy Smith had laid out before quitting the case doesn’t mean his strategy was deficient.
Smith laid out what his strategy was until he quit the case and Gontarek was appointed to represent Bailey. In death penalty cases, a lawyer should focus his efforts on influencing either the guilt phase or the penalty phase, Smith said.
“My focus was strictly on the penalty phase,” he said. Smith, who has tried more cases in the 14th Judicial Circuit than any other attorney, said his opinion was that Bailey would be convicted of first-degree premeditated murder, and the jury would recommend death.
“To me, it was one of the strongest cases of premeditation I’ve ever seen,” Smith said.
But because Florida law prohibits executing the mentally retarded, Smith focused on presenting evidence that Bailey was retarded after the first IQ test put Bailey’s IQ in the high 60s. Evidence that Bailey was retarded was his only hope to avoid a death sentence, Smith said.
“The more I looked, the more I became convinced he was mentally retarded,” Smith said. Bailey had “deficits in adaptive functioning,” Smith said, which is why he couldn’t hold jobs and never had a driver’s license or a checking account.
Write An Inmate - News
Bailey was able to speak and write capably, but there were things in Bailey's past that prompted Smith to have his IQ tested. “I knew that he ate paint chips, fell out of a window, drank gasoline,” Smith testified Wednesday.
But Jett thought otherwise, and decided to write a letter asking state Secretary of Justice and Public Safety J. Michael Brown to defer his release for 60 days so he could stay until the end of the show. He received no response and was released in
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But current policies limit these alternatives to six months per inmate. Extending these options to 12 months would give inmates more time to prepare for a successful transition to civil life and, at the same time, cut the federal prison budget by $45
NYPD Probing Tupac Shooting Claim | News One
Police spokesman Paul Browne said Wednesday that if police determine the post is legitimate they will seek to interview the prisoner.
The claim, attributed to Dexter Isaac, was posted on the website AllHipHop.com. In a letter that the site said came from a Brooklyn prison, Isaac said he was paid $2,500 by another hip-hop mogul to rob Shakur outside a studio in Manhattan in 1994.
Shakur suffered gunshot wounds but eventually recovered. He was killed in 1996 in an unsolved slaying.
Much of the post is laced with bitterness directed at the person the writer says hired him to carry out the crime. The writer says that person has wrongly accused him of being a government informant.
“Now I would like to clear up a few things, because the statute of limitations is over, and no one can be charged, and I’m just plain tired of listening to your lies,” Isaac wrote, adding that the mogul also allowed him to keep some of the jewelry he stole from Shakur.
“I still have as proof the chain we took in the robbery,” he writes.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, a person named Dexter Isaac is serving life in prison and is housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
An employee there said inmates were not allowed to receive calls and were allowed only approved in-person visits. In order to be approved, a person must first write to the inmate, and receive a visitor form.
It wasn’t clear whether Isaac still had a lawyer, and a call to the website wasn’t returned.
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