Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 14

Thread: Dean Phillip Carter - California Death Row

  1. #1
    Guest
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    5,534

    Dean Phillip Carter - California Death Row


    Dean Phillip Carter


    Facts of the Crime:

    Carter was sentenced to death on September 9, 1991 for the April 14, 1984 murder of Janette Cullins, 24, who was strangled and stuffed into a closet at her Pacific Beach apartment. A year earlier, on February 6, 1990, he had been sentenced to death in Los Angeles Superior Court for the murders of three women in Los Angeles just days before Cullins was killed. Prosecutors in Alameda County initially charged Carter with an April 1984 Oakland murder as well, but dismissed that case after he was sentenced to death for the others, documents filed with the Supreme Court stated. Carter was also convicted of raping a woman in San Diego 18 days before Janette Cullins was strangled, and of raping another woman. Police found items belonging to each of the murder victims in the car that Carter was driving when he was arrested in Arizona on April 17, 1984, and a bank surveillance video showed him withdrawing money from Janette Cullins' bank account the day her body was found, according to court documents. Additional victims on April 10, 11, 1984: Tok Kim, Susan Knoll, Bonnie Guthrie and Jilliet Mills.

  2. #2
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    On August 15, 2005, the California Supreme Court affirmed both of Carter's sentences on direct appeal.

    http://74.6.238.254/search/srpcache?...y57oLqfu4gcQ--

    On March 27, 2006, the US Supreme Court denied his certiorari petitions.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.a...es/05-8814.htm

    On July 20, 2006, Carter filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cal...v04532/371936/

    On June 17, 2010, the California Supreme Court denied Carter's habeas petitions.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...doc_no=S180336

  3. #3
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    What a shame!

    Death penalty advocate dies at 88; his daughter's murderer remains on death row

    George Cullins' long-held prediction was right. He died before the serial killer who murdered his daughter could be executed.

    Cullins, 88 and a former longtime North County resident, died in an Antelope Valley hospital Tuesday, about four months after a car crash left him and his wife hospitalized, family friends Louise and Walter Rogers said Friday.

    Dean Carter, the man who murdered Cullins' daughter in 1984, sits on California's death row, where he has lived since February 1990. He is serving a separate death sentence for killing three Los Angeles women.

    Cullins, a retired Marine Corps pilot, became a tireless advocate of the death penalty after Carter killed Janette Cullins, 24, strangling her and then stuffing her in a closet of her Pacific Beach residence in April 1984.

    Crime victim advocate Maggie Elvey said Cullins often told her he feared his daughter's killer would outlive him.

    "His justice was denied," Elvey said.

    After Janette Cullins' murder, her father "poured himself into, for the rest of his life, trying to get justice for Janette," longtime friend Ernie Southerland said.

    Southerland and Cullins were fellow Marine pilots when they met in 1946. And he was there when Cullins, back from the Korean War, met the woman who Cullins would run off to Las Vegas with and marry. Helen and George Cullins were married for more than 58 years.

    Cullins was a career Marine, who spent "a lot of years overseas flying C-130 transports all over the world," Southerland said.

    "He never met a stranger," Southerland said. "Everybody he met, he would walk up to and start a conversation. He was extremely gregarious. He wasn't perfect, made a lot of mistakes but never let it get him down. Others would wring their hands, but not George."

    Cullins and his wife were both injured in the late October car crash, the Rogerses said. Helen Cullins, who has Alzheimer's, suffered a broken neck and remains hospitalized, they said.

    George and Helen Cullins adopted four unrelated children ---- Janette was the second oldest ---- and moved to North County following his retirement from the military.

    In 1985, California passed a bill inspired by Cullins, who was infuriated when the San Diego County coroner's office billed him $65 for transporting his slain daughter's battered body to the morgue. The bill disallowed counties from charging the families of slaying victims for such transport, according to a Los Angeles Times story.

    In 1998, when visited by a North County Times reporter for an interview, a large picture of Janette Cullins hung in the home. Cullins also had pictures of his slain daughter ---- taken 10 days before her murder ---- hanging by a sign bearing the message, "Don't stop until the job is completed."

    He wrote letter after letter bashing administrators and politicians for allowing death penalty appeals to last for years. He penned editorial page columns, was active in crime victim groups and, right up until his death, could quote statistics on murder rates and executions off the top of his head, friends said.

    Cullins often spoke of his frustration as Carter's appeals attorney won 45 delays before the state Supreme Court heard the case in 2005 ---- with George and Helen Cullins sitting in the audience of the San Francisco courtroom.

    "He was certainly profoundly saddened by his daughter's death and wanted to honor her memory," said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Koch, who for years handled the prosecution's case as it went through the appeals process. "He was absolutely tenacious. It was something to see."

    Koch said Cullins would fax him ---- sometimes weekly ---- a photo of Janette Cullins and ask if he was doing all he could to get "justice for Janette."

    "The only way to get anything done is to put pressure on people," Cullins told the North County Times in 2005.

    The high court affirmed Carter's death sentence, but Carter has other legal matters pending in federal district court, said Deputy Attorney General Annie Featherman Fraser, who inherited the case from the soon-to-retire Koch.

    A few years ago, the Cullinses moved to Texas. The couple were in California for a funeral when the crash happened.

    Cullins' final wish, friends and family said, was to be buried in the same Oceanside crypt where his daughter's remains lie. Wife Helen, when she dies, will also have her remains placed in the crypt.

    "He was always the greatest of friends, and the greatest of Marines," Southerland said, "and above all, a relentless fighter for American justice."

    http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sd...17cea048a.html

  4. #4
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Serial killer's lone survivor torn by conscience

    Rose Steward woke up, certain someone else was in her bedroom. She saw a man, a red bandanna over his face and a knife in his hand, illuminated by a street light. She began to shake violently.

    For the next five hours, the man raped and choked her, twice to the point she lost consciousness. She was certain she would die. She grieved she was too young, only 22, and that her murder would destroy her mother.

    She struggled against panic and fought with her wits, pretending to like her attacker, cajoling him and sympathizing with him. When he finally left at dawn, she kissed him goodbye — then ran for help.

    After leaving Steward, Dean Carter went on a killing rampage, strangling, raping and stacking bodies in closets. Police say he murdered five women, from San Diego to Oakland, within 18 days. Steward's testimony helped prosecutors win two death sentences against Carter.

    Twenty-eight years after the murders, Carter remains on death row, writing a blog and pressing his appeals. That he continues to live frustrates and angers families of some of his victims. They want to watch him die.

    Steward, 50, sees it differently. She has endorsed the November ballot measure — Proposition 34 — to replace the death penalty with life without parole. She said she is tired of dreading the call that will inform her of the day he's to receive his lethal injection, and she's weary of seeing people who worked for his execution die before him.

    She has long opposed the death penalty but kept her views to herself during Carter's murder trials. The wait for Carter's execution — and with no immediate end in sight for the appeal process — has merely reinforced her sentiments. She said she wants to move on.

    But the wishes of Carter's other victims tug at her. During one of the murder trials, George Cullins, father of one of the murder victims, asked Steward for a favor. Cullins was approaching 70 and knew that Carter's appeals would drag on for decades.

    Would she take his place at Carter's execution if he could not be there?

    Steward was stunned and did not know how to respond.

    "I will try," she said.

    ::

    After her assault, which took place in Ventura on March 29, 1984, Steward started sleeping on her living room floor. She kept a loaded gun under her pillow — even after Carter was arrested during a traffic stop a month later with his victims' belongings in his car.

    Prosecutors decided to try him first for her rape and then call her to testify against him in the murder trials, scheduled for Los Angeles and San Diego.

    During their first courtroom encounter months later in Ventura, Steward said she managed to stare down Carter and felt stronger as a result. But she couldn't put the attack behind her because she would have to testify about it at the murder trials.

    She met Carter when he was staying at a neighbor's house. He was tall, handsome, quiet and "a little odd." Carter, then 28, tried to befriend her, but she went out of her way to avoid him.

    Late one night, two weeks after meeting him, she found him in her bedroom. He sexually assaulted her throughout the night, his hand clutching her throat. When she showed fear, he became more violent. So she feigned casualness, telling him she had been attracted to him but had feared rejection.

    When the sun came up, she told him she needed to go to work or her boss would come looking for her. Her voice was hoarse and gravelly from the choking. After walking him to the front door, she made him promise to call her.

    Once alone, she ran to a neighbor, who summoned police. By the time they arrived, Carter had vanished.

    Heading to a Santa Monica courtroom for Carter's first murder trial in 1989, Steward worried about how the victims' families would regard her.

    She had come to view the slain women — Jillette Leonora Mills, 25, Susan Lynn Knoll, 25, Bonnie Ann Guthrie, 34, Janette Anne Cullins, 24, and Tok Chum Kim, 42 — as "sisters" and saw herself as their voice.

    Would their families resent her for living while their loved ones died? Could she have prevented their murders by doing something differently? Did he kill because he realized she had tricked him and decided to leave no more witnesses?

    The loved ones of the other victims did not blame her. They were kind and warm. She especially "bonded" with George and Helen Cullins, the parents of Janette. The Cullinses attended the Santa Monica trial while awaiting their daughter's case in San Diego.

    Steward remembered the couple telling her during the trial that she looked like their daughter. "Look honey," Helen said to George one day at court, touching Steward's hand. "Her hair is even the same color."

    Once on the stand, Steward captivated the courtroom. The prosecutor considered her the state's best witness against Carter. Jennifer Bollman, a sister of victim Jillette Mills, recalled that Steward was gutsy on the stand, describing her assault in detail even as defense lawyers tried to make "it look like it was her fault."

    During the penalty phase, Bollman and other family members of the victims testified they wanted Carter executed. Helen Cullins told a reporter that she wanted to see him strangled, as her daughter was strangled.

    When the jury recommended the death penalty, Steward said, the other victims' vehemence muted her reaction. Though she opposed the death penalty, she was happy for the families of the dead women. She did not feel it was her place to express an opinion.

    At Carter's second murder trial in San Diego, George Cullins approached her with his request.

    ::

    Struggling to put the crimes behind her, Steward moved to Colorado. She noticed that people seemed to recoil when they learned of her night with a serial killer.

    "I was associated with such horror, and it was on me in a way," she said. "I felt people draw away."

    She watched from afar as George Cullins became a victims' rights activist, publicly deploring the sluggish pace of the justice system. Determined that Carter's execution remain a priority, he regularly faxed a photograph of his daughter to a deputy attorney general.

    Steward shared his outrage when she discovered that Carter was writing a blog — "Deadman Talking" — with the help of someone on the outside. In his writings, Carter professed his innocence, though he never mentioned the crimes, focusing more on life on death row and offering opinions on current events. Steward called the man who was posting Carter's musings and complained.

    For a while, she and the Cullinses exchanged notes. She said she grieved when she read last year that George had died after a car accident. He was 88.

    "George never got to see the end of this," said Steward, who is now a parent and owner of a painting business.

    When she read during the summer that Californians would be voting on a proposition to replace the death penalty, she wrote a note of support to the campaign, which enlisted her to join other crime victims at two news conferences.

    Steward has no sympathy for Carter — she regards him as "a shell," a man without a soul — and wants him placed in the general prison population "so he can feel fear." In her mind, death row has given him celebrity status, a podium, and she wants that taken away.

    Still, she is worried that expressing her views might offend the families of Carter's other victims, and it has.

    Bollman, 55, describes Steward's position as a betrayal. Bollman is furious that Carter, now 56, has been in prison longer than her sister, Jillette, lived. She wants to attend Carter's execution, look him in the eye and say, "Now you are getting yours."

    Steward respects those feelings, but for her, a commutation to life without possibility of parole would close the chapter. She knows she will never be able to honor Cullins' request to attend Carter's execution.

    "That would bring it all back," she said.

    http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...228,full.story
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

  5. #5
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    On March 1, 2013, Carter's habeas petition was DENIED in Federal District Court.

    http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal...532/371936/80/

    On July 16, 2013, Carter filed an appeal before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir.../ca9/13-99007/

  6. #6
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    On March 28, 2019, oral argument will be heard in Carter's appeal before the Ninth Circuit.

    https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/calenda...5-28&year=2019

  7. #7
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    The panel hearing Carter's appeal will be made up of Judge Rawlinson (Clinton), Senior Judge Clifton (G.W. Bush) and Judge Bybee (G.W. Bush).

    https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/calenda...5-28&year=2019

  8. #8
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    In today's opinions, the Ninth Circuit DENIED Carter's appeal.

    http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastor...6/13-99003.pdf

  9. #9
    Senior Member CnCP Addict johncocacola's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Posts
    643
    Only something like a governor issued moratorium could save him now.....

  10. #10
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2015
    Location
    New Jersey, unfortunately
    Posts
    4,382
    *Gavin Newsom has entered the chat*
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •