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Thread: Carey Padgett Sentenced to Life Imprisonment in 2010 VA Rape/Murder of Cara Holley

  1. #11
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    Motions hearing for Roanoke County man who could be sentenced to death this month

    Lawyers for Shane Padgett and the commonwealth's attorney had a motions hearing to settle who might be able to testify during his capital murder sentencing scheduled to start on Saint Patrick's day.

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  2. #12
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    Sentencing hearing under way for Shane Padgett; death penalty possible

    A sentencing hearing began today for a convicted murderer facing the death penalty. Shane Padgett plead guilty last year to raping and killing Cara Holley in Roanoke County almost four years ago. Her body was found in Franklin County. The sentencing hearing could take up to ten days, and Padgett could get the death penalty because he did not take a plea deal. Members of Holley’s family testified in court this morning that their daughter had told them about threatening messages she had recieved from Padgett. His defense will try to prove he was in an altered mental state at the time of the murder.

    http://wfirnews.com/local-news/sente...nalty-possible
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  3. #13
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    Sentencing begins in Roanoke County capital murder case



    The man responsible for the brutal 2010 killing of Cara Marie Holley appeared Monday in Roanoke County Circuit Court, kicking off a multiday sentencing hearing with his life now at stake.

    In an effort to convince Judge James Swanson that Carey Shane Padgett should be sentenced to life in prison instead of death, defense attorney Jay Finch said he’d prepared a case highlighting Padgett’s troubled childhood.

    “It’s a very sad day to be here,” Finch said. “A young life has been taken, and another young life may be lost.

    “A boy who described himself as ‘the worst little boy in the world,’ ” he added, recalling one of Padgett’s many childhood sessions with counselors.

    But Finch will have to contend with Roanoke County Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Leach, who said he had evidence to show Padgett remains violent and a future danger to those around him.

    “He followed his plan,” Leach said of the slaying. “This was not a random act where he just lost it in some rage.”

    Padgett pleaded guilty in October to two counts of capital murder and to abduction and robbery in the July 7, 2010, case. He pleaded no contest to three additional counts of capital murder and charges of abduction with the intent to defile, forcible sodomy and rape.

    Leach said that over the next several days he would call at least one forensic expert and others to the stand. On Monday, though, Holley’s relatives were the ones asked to step into the spotlight.

    The first to take the stand was Cody Hoosier, Holley’s brother and one of the last people to see her alive. In a mournful yet resolute tone, Hoosier described the escalation of concern that spread throughout Holley’s family and friends in the hours after her disappearance.

    She was scheduled to meet him for dinner at his apartment.

    “We were just so close that if plans fell through, it wasn’t an issue,” Hoosier explained.

    But when he received a text message from her phone number (actually composed and sent by Padgett), he started to worry. The message said her car had trouble, that she was staying with a friend.

    “She would have called her dad,” Hoosier said.

    When asked about their initial impressions of Padgett when they first met him, Holley’s family answered almost uniformly.

    Quiet. Introverted. He didn’t talk much.

    There were at least two occasions when her parents recalled Padgett sending strange text messages to their daughter, though she waved off their worries, dismissing the messages as lacking any real threat.

    Mike Holley said he learned of one message while on a drive with his daughter.

    “He told me he was going to kill me one day,” Cara Holley had said, according to Mike Holley.

    “Cara, something is wrong with that,” he responded. “People don’t say things like that.”

    “He says stuff,” she replied.

    Mike Holley’s voice began to waver during his time on the stand. He was supposed to meet his daughter at Virginia Western Community College for orientation the week she was murdered. She had been excited to start classes there, relatives said.

    It was when she missed orientation that Cara Holley’s mother, Lisa Cowling, asked that the police get involved.

    “I knew something was desperately wrong,” Cowling said.

    She had met Padgett in passing, found him quiet and strange. It wasn’t until she discussed a second text message Padgett sent her daughter that she got odd vibes about him. In the message, arranged as a seeming expression of affection, Padgett said his face would be the last face that she would see alive, because he loved her so much.

    Cowling said she warned her daughter, who again brushed concern aside.

    “She wasn’t scared of him,” she said.

    Finch said he expects to share parts of Padgett’s past starting on Wednesday, which may include calling counselors from his client’s past to the stand to testify about his mental well-being through the years. At the outset of the sentencing hearing, Finch explained Padgett’s father had killed himself with a gunshot to the head, just one of many moments in his life that have contributed to instability, the attorney said.

    http://www.roanoke.com/news/sentenci...7a43b2370.html
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  4. #14
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    Padgett’s mother testifies about family life

    The prosecution rested its case in the sentencing phase of the Carey Shane Padgett capital murder case Wednesday, opening the floor to his attorney, who has sought to highlight the man’s troubled past.

    Defense attorney Jay Finch has built a defense that he hopes will convince Roanoke County Circuit Court Judge James Swanson that Padgett should not receive the death penalty for the brutal July 2010 death of Cara Marie Holley. To kick off his argument, Finch called Padgett’s mother to the stand.

    Short, soft-spoken and wrapped in a heavy sweater, Bonnie Haines pushed at a box of tissues as she gave her testimony. She sat on the stand for longer than an hour and a half, walking the courtroom through her son’s life and the obstacles her family had faced.

    For the majority of Padgett’s life, Haines operated as a single mom working multiple jobs. His father committed suicide before Padgett entered middle school, heaping the responsibilities of child rearing on Haines and anyone close to her who was willing to help.

    As Padgett grew older, developmental problems that started with verbal struggles became more pronounced to the people around him, she said.

    “It started with his school,” Haines said. “They were seeing some issues. His issues were a little beyond the school counselor.”

    Outbursts. Hearing voices. Seeing the ghost of his father sitting on the living room couch.

    Haines testified that twice she had her son committed to LewisGale Behavioral Center, describing it as a “mental institution.”

    Specific diagnoses came and went for Padgett. The one that stuck through the years was his depression, Haines said. And once he entered Patrick Henry High School, he started acting in strange ways, ways that got negative attention from his classmates, some of whom took the stand Wednesday.

    Weird. Quiet. Infamous. Those were the descriptors former classmates used when describing Padgett in court — three of whom were women he’d offered $1,000 to spend time with him just days prior to Holley’s death. In the wake of the murder, all three said they felt it could have been them who perished.

    Aaron Parker, 24, said he remembered Padgett coming to school occasionally in costumes. Sometimes, he would even walk through the halls screaming racial slurs around black students or derogatory terms at female students.

    When asked how she reacted when she learned her son was the suspect in a murder case, Haines exhaled.

    “I was shocked when they told me,” she said. “I never ever thought he would hurt anyone. He absorbed it all in, never out. He never hit anyone.”

    The defense is expected to call more of Padgett’s relatives and other witnesses to the stand today and Friday.


    http://www.roanoke.com/news/crime/ro...a4bcf6878.html
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  5. #15
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    Shane Padgett Sentencing Continues

    The sentencing phase of a capital murder case in Roanoke County has entered its fourth day.

    Shane Padgett was found guilty last year in the death of former Patrick Henry High School classmate Cara Holley back in 2010.

    Lawyers for Padgett are now calling witnesses as they work to persuade the judge that Padgett should receive life in prison versus the death penalty.

    Thursday's testimony included one witness after another who know Padgett - some from many years ago; others family members with regular contact.

    The defense worked to show Padgett had emotional difficulties because of his father's suicide and lack of attention from his mother.

    They also tried to show Padgett as a non-violent person.

    Most clearly, though, was that Padgett had some interesting behavioral issues that gave off the impression of a significant need for attention.

    Something one of Padgett's ninth grade teachers, Lynn Yates, testified to.

    "(He)Exhibited behaviors that were disruptive to the classroom. He wasn't interested in school very much so I had a difficult time relating to him," said Yates.

    Earlier testimony shows Padgett's own words to friends were along the lines that one day he would be famous... infamous is what he got.

    As they have been through this entire ordeal the surviving family of Cara Holley was in court listening to every word.

    This sentencing is set to wrap up a week from tomorrow.

    http://www.wset.com/story/25032129/s...cing-continues
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  6. #16
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    Expert cites childhood traumas in Padgett's youth



    Attorneys on Monday took a deep dive into the personality of Carey Shane Padgett, the Roanoke man facing a possible death sentence for the death of Cara Marie Holley.

    More than a dozen witnesses have taken the stand to testify in the sentencing phase of the case, which started March 17. The descriptions they offered of Padgett have coalesced into a rough portrait of a man with a turbulent past.

    Even when he was very young, Padgett always avoided eye contact, unable to read the emotional states of the people around him.

    But that observation only scratched at the surface of Padgett’s history of mental and emotional strife. To dig deeper, defense attorneys called just one witness to the stand Monday, Eileen Ryan, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia.

    Ryan, who has interviewed Padgett, his relatives and former therapists, and studied his medical and psychiatric history, testified as an expert witness in the case. She offered her own clinical interpretation of Padgett and his state of mind leading up to Holley’s death.

    During her time researching the man, Ryan said she was immediately struck by a series of traumatic events in Padgett’s early life. The separation of his parents and his father’s suicide, particularly.

    “It appears that, from family reports, an odd sort of reaction took place where the paternal family … were instructed to not bring up the father,” Ryan said. “And the defendant went from being called Carey Shane to just Shane.”

    Grief and uncertainty bottled inside, 9-year-old Padgett developed severe depression and dizzying mood swings. One psychiatrist would put him on a medication, another would switch it up. His mother, Bonnie Haines, eventually canceled medication altogether. He last experienced any psychiatric help when he was 11 years old.

    Now 25, Padgett sat hunched between a pair of attorneys — wearing the same despondent, unflinching expression he’s kept throughout the last week of court proceedings.

    “What you had here was a boy who had significant vulnerabilities in terms of his ability to identify and express emotions,” Ryan testified. “He repeatedly expressed the view that his life stunk.”

    Those vulnerabilities followed him through adolescence and high school, blossoming into moments where he would act up in school for attention, or seek sexual contact with women he barely knew, Ryan said. His drug use only inflamed his existing problems.

    During her interviews with Padgett, Ryan said he described the night he killed Holley. Sitting in Holley’s parked car in a big field off Bandy Road in Roanoke County, he spilled his feelings of hopelessness and loss, Ryan said.

    It was a rare moment of emotional intimacy, awash in a salvia-induced haze. The combination — salvia is an hallucinogenic plant-based drug — might have triggered something in his head, Ryan said.

    Single frames of instability in this and that corner of his past converged, flickered, then unfolded into a violent scene and his long fingers wrapped around her neck.

    They tumbled from the vehicle, her fighting for her life and him on top of her, strangling her into darkness. He bound her with tape, then started kicking and kicking. He grabbed a tire iron.

    It was a brutal end to Holley’s life, and for no particular reason. Padgett has told detectives that Holley was just the unlucky recipient of his rage.

    Judge James Swanson leaned forward on his bench and addressed Ryan directly. He questioned how she could describe the event as a spur-of-the-moment, psychotic act given evidence suggesting Padgett had planned for weeks to obtain someone’s car to leave the Roanoke area.

    “She was one of the few people who demonstrated, at least on occasion, that she cared for him,” Swanson said. “This was an act that took some time. What he did was brutal, savage.”

    Ryan nodded.

    “I don’t believe he was psychotic in the time leading up to the murder,” she said. “This was a psychosis that was transient, brief, and in my opinion, related to the intoxicant.”

    Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Leach was unconvinced, and walked Ryan through a list of names, young women Padgett had attempted to contact before Holley’s death. The ones without cars he eventually ignored. For a couple with cars, he offered $1,000 with the claim they’d be helping him move.

    Leach told Ryan about testimony that Padgett claimed to his acquaintances that he’d be famous, that they would read about him in the newspaper and see him on television. The prosecutor also mentioned the tape used to bind Holley, more evidence that the killing was planned.

    “Wouldn’t that make him a very dangerous man?” Leach asked.

    The case is scheduled to continue today. Attorneys said they anticipate they could begin making their closing remarks Wednesday. It is unclear when the judge will sentence Padgett.

    http://www.roanoke.com/news/crime/ro...a4bcf6878.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  7. #17
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    Padgett avoids death penalty, sentenced to five life terms

    By Chase Purdy

    Carey Shane Padgett will spend the rest of his life in prison for the brutal killing of former high school classmate Cara Marie Holley in Roanoke County, a judge ruled today.

    Circuit Judge James Swanson sentenced Padgett, 25, this afternoon to five life terms plus 175 years in prison for the July 2010 killing. Padgett strangled Holley before kicking her, beating her with a tire iron and sexually assaulting her. He left the 18-year-old’s body in a Franklin County field and was stopped later by police in her vehicle.

    Asked if he had anything to say by the judge, Padgett said: “I’m sorry for what I did.”

    Padgett has pleaded guilty in September to two counts of capital murder and to abduction and robbery. He pleaded no contest to three additional counts of capital murder and charges of abduction with the intent to defile, forcible sodomy and rape.

    In their closing arguments, attorneys focused their attention on whether there was enough evidence to show Padgett was a risk for future dangerousness, one of the key questions for a court to consider when weighing use of the death penalty.

    Roanoke County Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Leach began his argument with a blunt statement.

    “Your honor, we are here today because someone is not,” Leach said. “Cara Holley is gone.”

    Behind him, more than 20 people sat in the courtroom gallery, Holley’s family and friends. Clutching bits of tissue paper, they dabbed their eyes to no avail as Leach walked the court through the shear brutality Holley suffered at the hands of Padgett.

    For the last several days, defense attorneys have sought to explain the killing as a moment of psychosis on Padgett’s part, a perfect storm of drug use, a sense of hopelessness, and a past riddled with trouble.

    Leach dismissed the notion outright, pointing to grisly photographs of Holley, taken shortly after she was uncovered by police.

    “I think they’re important to show this wasn’t some wild, off-the-handle act,” he said. “He was very much aware of what was happening.”

    To support his analysis of the case, Leach walked the court through the days leading up to the murder, noting Padgett’s attempts to contact three other women to meet him before he planned to leave the Roanoke area for good. The prosecutor recounted one of Padgett’s statements to the police, when questioned about what Holley, a former classmate from Roanoke's Patrick Henry High School, had done to upset him.

    “She didn’t do anything,” he told officers. “She was just the unfortunate one who got picked.”

    Leach again focused on the level of brutality Padgett employed to kill Holley — strangulation, kicking, beating with a tire iron and more.

    Holley’s father, his face flush with tears, stood up and left the courtroom.

    “The tire iron went through her eye. It went through her brain,” Leach emphasized. “Does that show torture? Does that show depravity of mind?”

    He paused.

    “Yes.”

    In a retort, defense attorney Steve Milani embarked on a lengthy monologue, detailing what he described as a number of mitigating factors that would warrant avoiding the death penalty in the case.

    Milani began by acknowledging the crime and the violence behind it, but urged the court to consider Padgett’s troubled past. A speech problem when he was younger that reduced him to grunting until middle school. The separation of his young parents. The suicide of his father and the explosion of mental and behavioral issues that followed.

    “Look at the arc of the life that Mr. Padgett has led,” Milani said. “We know he had an issue at a very young age.”

    He emphasized Padgett’s inability to understand emotions like so many of his peers, including remorse.

    “A person who is so damaged that they don’t understand remorse, that doesn’t understand emotion — I would suggest that diminishes moral culpability.”

    The court stood in silence for a moment.

    “Can it give rise to mercy?” Milani asked. “I ask only for the modicum of mercy of a life sentence.”

    In a rebuttal, and his final remarks to Swanson, Leach asked a question that resonated among Holley’s relatives and friends. A question that left them nodding their heads and muttering to one another.

    “What mercy did he show to Cara Holley?” he asked. “He showed no mercy at all.”

    http://www.roanoke.com/news/crime/ro...a4bcf6878.html

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