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Thread: Karu Gene White - Kentucky Death Row

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    Karu Gene White - Kentucky Death Row


    Karu Gene White


    Facts of the Crime:

    Was sentenced to death on March 29, 1980 in Powell County for the murder of three Breathitt County residents. On the evening of February 12, 1979, White and two accomplices entered a Haddix, Kentucky store operated by two elderly men, Charles Gross and Sam Chaney and an elderly woman Lula Gross. White and his accomplices bludgeoned to death the men and woman. They took a billfold containing $7,000, coins, and a handgun. White was arrested on July 27, 1979.

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    August 27, 2010

    Kentucky's longest-serving death row inmate will undergo a test, to see if he is mentally retarded.

    The Kentucky Supreme Court's ruling on the case of 51-year-old Karu White, means he may miss his date with the death penalty.

    White has been on death row since 1980.

    That's when he was convicted of the murder of three people.

    A year before he was convicted, White and his companions robbed a store, killing three people in the process.

    http://www.wbko.com/home/headlines/101616388.html

    Opinion is here:

    http://opinions.kycourts.net/sc/2010-SC-000280-OA.pdf

  3. #3
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    In past year, little progress in Kentucky's oldest death row case

    JACKSON, Ky. — This is what passed for progress during 2010 in the case of Karu Gene White, who is about to conclude his 31st year on Kentucky’s death row:

    First, Special Circuit Judge Gary Payne forgot about the case for the second time in five months, acknowledging to a reporter that he lost track of it, and had failed to rule on a pending issue.

    Finally last April, his memory jogged again, Payne made his decision, which reaffirmed a prior one by him authorizing a mental retardation evaluation of White at the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center in La Grange.

    But that resolved nothing. Attorneys for White and the state Attorney General’s office merely resumed their legal jousting over who should examine White to address his long-pending claim that he is mentally retarded and thus ineligible for execution.

    The Attorney General’s office contends that KCPC is the proper place for the evaluation. White counters that he should be examined by a professional of his choosing, and that the state should pay for it.

    The issues surrounding White’s alleged retardation have been in litigation since he first raised them in October 2003.

    Even after they are decided by the Kentucky Supreme Court, there will be no end in sight to White’s case, because he will then take his retardation claim back to U.S. District Court. The issue has been held in abeyance there since January 2004, while White pursued remedies in the state courts.

    White’s is the oldest pending death-row appeal in Kentucky and is among the top 3 percent of the longest-pending capital punishment appeals nationwide, according to statistics compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

    The U.S. Supreme Court already has twice declined to hear his case.

    Now 52, White was just 20 years old when he murdered three elderly people — Charlie Gross, his wife, Lula, and her brother, Sam Chaney — during a February 1979 robbery at their roadside store in the Breathitt County community of Haddix.

    During his trial, White admitted robbing the store and answered, “I must have,” when asked whether he struck the victims, who were bludgeoned to death. In a legal brief filed a decade ago, his own attorneys acknowledged that he participated both in the robbery and the fatal beatings.

    So far, White has outlived the attorney who prosecuted him, the judge who presided over his trial and the Supreme Court justice who wrote the opinion upholding his conviction and who referred to the “barbaric … bestial manner in which the victims were murdered.”

    Meanwhile, the sole surviving child of two of White’s three victims is in failing health.

    After Vesta Moore was interviewed in 2009 by The Courier-Journal about the case at her home in Jackson, she required hospitalization, in part as a result of the stress associated with recalling her parents’ horrific demise. Now 81 years old, Moore is too infirm to discuss the case again, according to her daughter.

    “She’d like to see something happen in her lifetime, but the way she’s going right now, she may not,” Mary Lou Herald said. “She’s been pretty sick the last two years. Every time she hears about them, or a song about a mother and father, she breaks down and cries.”

    Through a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Corrections, White recently declined an interview request.

    One of his attorneys, Kevin McNally of Frankfort, said in an e-mail exchange about a possible interview: “I wouldn’t say never, but I wouldn’t count on it. …Maybe some day, but no time soon.”

    White actually was transported to KCPC last May for the evaluation ordered by Payne. Once there, however, White invoked several constitutional claims and refused to cooperate with the clinical psychologist who was attempting to perform tests to determine his intelligence level.

    As a result, the evaluation was not performed. Two days later White was returned to the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville.

    His case is now before the Kentucky Supreme Court for a ruling pertaining to a decision it rendered last August, upholding the earlier one by Payne requiring White to submit to an evaluation at KCPC. But the court also directed Payne to reconsider the question of whether White is entitled to public funds to employ an expert of his choosing.

    The Attorney General’s office objected to that portion of the ruling and requested a rehearing. The Attorney General also has argued that because White did not cooperate at KCPC in May he has “waived any claim regarding (a) mental retardation evaluation.”

    White’s attorneys, in turn, opposed the Attorney General’s objection and requested that it be stricken from the court record or sealed, along with a letter from the KCPC clinical psychologist describing White’s refusal to cooperate.

    On Nov. 17, the state Supreme Court ordered the KCPC report removed from the rehearing petition. But because the petition itself contained excerpts from psychologist Richard K. Johnson’s letter, the essence of it remained public.

    Asked recently whether Attorney General Jack Conway would consider bring White’s case to a conclusion by offering him a deal that would keep him in prison for the rest of his life, spokeswoman Allison Gardner Martin responded in an e-mail:

    “No. A judge and jury sentenced Karu White, and it is the statutory duty of this office to represent the Commonwealth in efforts to uphold that criminal conviction.”

    Payne, a former Fayette Circuit Court judge now on senior status, is the seventh trial-court judge to have a role in the case.

    It was assigned to him in October 2007, and had been pending before him, awaiting a ruling, for nine months when the newspaper contacted him in November 2009 and asked why nothing had happened.

    Payne said he had lost sight of the case but would rule “soon.”

    Five months later, however, he still hadn’t done so.

    “I didn’t get that order out,” Payne said on April 9. “I was on the road when you called, and when I got home I had forgotten about it again, and here we are.”

    Payne pledged then to issue a ruling the following week, which he did.

    He acknowledged in a recent interview that 31 years “is a long time” for a case to go unresolved, and he hoped not to lose track of White’s appeal again.

    “Senior judges don’t have assistants; we have to keep track of our own dockets,” Payne said by way of explaining his previous oversights. “Unless you’re a person who’s on top of everything, and I’m not, I think it’s hard for somebody like myself, who’s not the best when it comes to organization, to stay on top of things.”

    Payne is not the first judge to overlook White’s case. And the delays he has caused so far are minimal compared to the more than seven years the case lay dormant from December 1986 until March 1994.

    In that instance, neither the judge at the time nor the attorneys involved — including McNally, who is widely regarded as highly skilled in death-penalty defense — had taken any steps to advance it.

    Then, a hearing that the Kentucky Supreme Court decreed in August 1996 should be held “as expeditiously as possible” didn’t occur until 33 months later. And there have been several periods of inaction in the case of a year or more.

    Although delay generally is regarded as an ally of death-penalty defendants whose guilt is not in dispute, McNally has insisted that he never intentionally prolonged the case in order to keep White alive, and that the prosecutors and judges involved have had an equal or greater obligation to move it forward.

    Herald said she and her parents don’t much care who’s responsible for the prolonged appeal; they just want closure.

    “For the guy to be on death row as long as he’s been on, I just can’t understand it,” Herald said. “I was pregnant with my second son when all this happened. He’s 31 now.”

    http://www.courier-journal.com/artic...death+row+case

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    33-year-old death penalty case in Ky. goes 16 months without judge

    A judge has been appointed to Kentucky's longest-running death row case after an Associated Press inquiry into why it had been pending 16 months without one.

    The case of 54-year-old Karu Gene White, sentenced to death in 1980 for killing three people, had been on hold due to questions about whether he is mentally disabled.

    Chief Regional Circuit Judge John David Caudill of Floyd County appointed himself Wednesday to oversee White's case, an appeal that has been pending for more than a decade.

    The Administrative Office of the Courts told The Associated Press the court system had been unaware there were issues in White's case.

    White was sentenced to death for the killings of 75-year-old Charles Gross; his wife, 74-year-old Lula Gross; and 79-year-old Sam Chaney during a robbery of a small store in Breathitt County in 1979.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    Federal judge wants lingering death-penalty case moving

    A long-running death penalty case from eastern Kentucky is getting a kick-start from a federal judge.

    U.S. District Judge Karen K. Caldwell has set a November meeting date for prosecutors and attorneys for 54-year-old Karu Gene White to lay out a schedule for resolving his appeals, which have been pending in federal court for more than a decade.

    White arrived at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville in 1980, when he was 21. Since then, he's fought his conviction in state and federal courts. Caldwell halted proceedings in his most recent federal appeal in 2002 while White sought funding in state court to test if he has a mental disability.

    White killed 75-year-old Charles Gross, his wife, 74-year-old Lula Gross, and 79-year-old Sam Chaney during a February 1979 store robbery in Haddix, an Appalachian mountain community of about 2,270 people in Breathitt County.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that people with mental disabilities were ineligible for execution. White raised the claim shortly after that decision, prompting the federal appeal to be delayed while White sought funding for tests in state court.

    Caldwell ruled Friday that the mental disability claim could proceed in state court while the rest of White's appeal could move forward in federal court. The judge also noted that White's case isn't anywhere near being resolved, with several years of appeals left to be pursued.

    White's case has been delayed multiple times by multiple issues.

    "For instance, White himself was responsible for a considerable portion of the delay when he defied a court order to participate in a mental retardation evaluation in a state run facility," Caldwell wrote. "On the other hand, the Commonwealth caused significant delay when it failed to appoint a new presiding judge for 16 months."

    White's case languished in limbo after the retirement of Special Judge Gary Payne of Lexington. The state appointed a new jurist in April, after The Associated Press questioned why the case did not have an assigned judge.

    White has been on death row for more than 3 decades - twice the average 15-year stay for a condemned inmate in Kentucky.

    The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics lists 3,158 people on death row as of Dec. 31, 2010, the last year available. Only about 100 are as old as White's case.

    White's guilt is undisputed. During his trial testimony, he admitted robbing the store and answered, "I must have," when asked whether he struck the victims. And in a legal brief filed nearly a decade ago, his own attorneys acknowledged that he participated in the robbery and the beatings.

    Chaney and the Grosses lived at the store and residents knew that even if it was closed they could make an after-hours purchase simply by knocking on the back door.

    At his trial, White testified that he had known the victims all his life and considered them "real good people." But he also acknowledged that he wanted their money - rumored at the time to amount to $60,000 or more in cash stored in hidden jars and wallets. The take, however, was just $7,000.

    After the killings, White said he bought marijuana and went home to bed.

    White has raised numerous issues over the years, including the long delay in implementing his death sentence and the fact that he was sentenced to death while 1 co-defendant, Chuck Fisher, received immunity in exchange for his testimony, and the other, Tommy L. Bowling, was paroled after serving just 8 years of a 140-year term.

    Fisher was only 16 at the time of the murders; Bowling was 17. Bowling, now 52, was convicted in Florida of 9 counts of molestation and sexual battery of a child and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His current release date is in 2025.

    (Source: The Associated Press)
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    Ky's longest-serving death row inmate claims mental issue, twice refuses testing in prison

    Kentucky's longest-serving death row inmate is claiming he has a mental disability, but refusing to be tested at the state's prison psychiatric ward.

    Karu Gene White, 54, has declined to cooperate with two scheduled mental exams and his attorneys have advised him to say no to a third examination.

    Attorneys Kevin McNally and Margaret O'Donnell want White examined by a private psychiatrist with the state picking up the tab.

    The fight over which doctors can conduct a mental exam and if the state should pay for a private doctor has been lingering since White first raised it in 1984.

    With the entering its third decade, state prosecutors are pushing for a judge to send him for a mental exam at the state facility or bring the claim to an end.

    http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...h-Row-Old-Case
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    Longest-Serving Death Row Inmate In Kentucky Is 'Mental'?

    The attorney of Kentucky's longest-serving death row inmate said his client is mentally challenged and should not face the death penalty.

    They said Karu White was abused as a kid and has a low I.Q. His attorney says he's notn eligible for execution because of a U.S. Supreme Court Ruling from 2002. That ruling stated those with mental disabilities don't have to face execution.

    White killed three people in their 70s during a robbery in the small mountain community of Haddix.

    http://www.wtvq.com/mostpopular/stor..._KRea_q4A.cspx
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

  8. #8
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Itīs so annoying to read the same cheap tricks over and over again.
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

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    WHITE v COMMONWEALTH

    Opinion Date: May 5, 2016

    Court: Kentucky Supreme Court

    In 1980, Appellant was convicted by a jury of three counts of capital murder and sentenced to death on each of the murders. The Supreme Court affirmed. In 2004, Appellant filed a post-conviction motion to set aside his death sentences on the grounds that he is intellectually disabled. The circuit court judge ordered the Finance and Administration Cabinet to pay up to $5,000 for a mental health evaluation by a private psychologist. The Supreme Court remanded the case for a showing that use of a state facility was impractical. On remand, the circuit court determined that the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center (KCPC) was capable of conducting the necessary evaluations and ordered that any failure to cooperate would constitute a waiver of Appellant’s intellectual disability claim. After Appellant indicated that he would refuse evaluation by KCPC, the trial court determined that he had waived his intellectual disability claim and ordered that his case be dismissed. The Supreme Court (1) affirmed the judgment of the circuit court finding that Appellant was not entitled to public funds for an expert of his choosing; and (2) reversed the judgment on the issue of waiver, holding that Appellant’s continued failure to submit to KCPC’s custody did not constitute waiver. Remanded.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

  10. #10
    aclay
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    How close is Kentucky to resuming executions?

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