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Thread: Mario Lynn Phillips - North Carolina Death Row

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    Mario Lynn Phillips - North Carolina Death Row




    Facts of the Crime:

    A Moore County jury handed up four death sentences in September 2007 in the trial of a man found guilty of killing four people in a December 2003 robbery. The jury took about four hours to decide the punishment of Mario Lynn Phillips who was the first of three people to go to trial for the quadruple homicide. Eddie Ryals, 21, Carl Garrison Justice, 18, and Harvey Darrell Hobson, 20, all of Carthage, and Joseph Allen Harden, 19, of Vass, were killed on December 19, 2003, in a mobile home on Heron Road, east of Carthage. All four had been shot and stabbed in what authorities said was a robbery. They said the three suspects made off with $170.

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    October 18, 2007

    Phillips gets death sentence

    A Moore County jury decided Wednesday that Mario Lynn Phillips should die for murdering 4 men in December 2003.

    The jury deliberated nearly 4 1/2 hours before sentencing Phillips for the murders of Eddie Lynn Ryals, Carl “C.J.” Justice Jr., Joseph Allen Harden and Daryl Hobson.

    They were shot and stabbed to death during a robbery in Ryals’ home in the Carolina Lakes mobile home park in Moore County.

    Ryals’ girlfriend, Amanda Cooke Varner, was shot and stabbed but survived.

    Renee Yvette McLaughlin and Sean Maurice Ray have been charged with helping Phillips commit the murders and robbery. They are awaiting trial.

    As he has throughout the trial, Phillips showed little reaction. He has told the judge he is taking Prozac, an anti-depressant, and Haldol, a drug used to treat psychotic symptoms.

    When Judge James Webb had Phillips stand so he could formally give him the 4 death sentences, Phillips listened for a few moments, then reached down to the table, poured himself a cup of water and drank it while the judge announced the punishments.

    The death sentences pleased relatives of the victims.

    "I think they all 3 deserve the death sentence," said Harvey Hobson, father of Daryl. "All 3 could have stopped at any time. Either one of them could have persuaded him not to do it, and they didn't and I think they ought to be put to death."

    Harvey Hobson attended the trial daily since testimony began Sept. 12.

    "There ain't no winners here," said Belinda Hobson, who was Daryl's stepmother. "Everybody has lost, including Mario's mother. And it's just sad that this happened and we can't turn back time. We'd love to have our kids back."

    Phillips' mother, Bertie Phillips, also attended every day of the trial. She left the courtroom just before the sentence was announced. In the hall, she leaned heavily on a railing and said she was having trouble breathing. She declined an interview request after the sentencing.

    The death sentences disappointed Libby Barnes, a woman who knew Phillips when he was a boy. She testified on his behalf.

    "Mario's a victim, too, of the system. The system that failed him as a child," Barnes said. She said Phillips and one of his brothers grew up in horrible conditions of neglect and abuse as family members spent most of their time drinking and fighting.

    "Not only did those children not have a bed to sleep in, a room to call their own, they had no where to get away from all this adult mayhem that was constantly going on," Barnes said.

    Phillips received 4 death sentences for the murders. He was also sentenced to a minimum of 54 years, 10 months in prison for:

    Attempted 1st-degree murder of Varner.

    Assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious bodily injury on Varner.

    1st-degree kidnapping of Varner.

    1st-degree arson.

    Robbery with a firearm of Ryals.

    Phillips admitted to the crimes.

    His lawyers argued he did not deserve the death penalty.

    They said his ability to control his actions was impaired by the childhood of abuse, by drugs and alcohol in his system, by his low IQ and by rage and anguish from another, unrelated shooting. His brother Julian was shot in the head that day in Fayetteville.

    After learning his brother was shot, Phillips went from Fayetteville to Moore County to tell his mother what happened, according to trial testimony.

    He was with McLaughlin and Ray. The 3 met Hobson at a trailer in Carolina Lakes then went to Ryals’ home nearby.

    There they met Ryals, Varner, Justice and Harden.

    The 8 people sat in the living room and talked for about 30 minutes. Phillips jumped up, pulled a revolver and started shooting and demanding drugs and money.

    According to testimony, Phillips shot and beat the victims, Ray stabbed the victims and McLaughlin kept the victims under control while the other two searched the home. The ordeal went on between 1 and 2 hours.

    Finally the house was set afire.

    Varner, bleeding from 2 gunshot wounds and 22 stab wounds, lived. She crawled out of the burning home to get help, she testified, but was caught by Phillips, McLaughlin and Ray. She said they put her in a pickup and drove her to a burn pile. She thought they would finish killing her there. Instead, they abandoned her for dead after their truck got stuck and they heard firetrucks coming to put out the burning home.

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Death Sentence Upheld

    Justices of the Supreme Court of North Carolina have upheld the conviction and death sentences of Mario Lynn Phillips for multiple murders in Moore County.

    Senior Resident Superior Court Judge James M. Webb sentenced Phillips to death on Oct. 17, 2007, after jurors found Phillips guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. The jury recommended death during the penalty phase of his trial.

    District Attorney Maureen Krueger prosecuted the case, which took weeks to try. Jurors found Phillips guilty of four counts of first-degree murder both on the basis of malice, premeditation, and deliberation and under the felony murder rule. They also convicted him of first-degree kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, attempted first-degree murder, robbery with a firearm, and first-degree arson.

    Phillips, 41, was convicted and sentenced to death for his part in four murders in a mobile home on Heron Road in the Carolina Lakes subdivision near Carthage. Eddie Ryals, C.G. Justice, Joseph Allen Hardin and Daryl Hobson were found dead Dec. 19, 2003, in Ryals' blood-splattered, partially burned mobile home.

    A co-defendant, Sean Ray, was tried and convicted separately but sentenced to life without parole. In capital cases juries weigh mitigating and aggravating factors, then recommend life or death. Another defendant, Renee Yvette McLaughlin, is serving a 12-year minimum sentence for kidnapping and being an accessory after the fact to murder.

    Death sentences in North Carolina are automatically appealed. On April 30, 2009, the N.C. Supreme Court allowed Phillips’ motion to bypass the state court of appeals as to his appeal of additional judgments. His appeal was heard in the Supreme Court on Feb. 15. 2010, and this month the high court affirmed both his conviction and his death sentence.

    “We conclude that defendant received a fair trial and capital sentencing proceeding, free from prejudicial error,” the court said. “The death sentence recommended by the jury and imposed by the trial court is not disproportionate. Accordingly, the judgments of the trial court are left undisturbed.”

    Justices considered a number of issues on appeal including whether Phillips’ waiver of his Miranda rights was valid. Attorney Bruce Cunningham of Southern Pines – as his provisional counsel – had rushed to the Sheriff’s Office but was not permitted to meet his client since Phillips had not asked for a lawyer before signing a waiver of his Miranda rights.

    Later, as lead counsel for the defense, Cunningham resolved a thorny question of whether he should resign as counsel in order to testify as a witness to statements he remembered Cameron Police Chief Gary McDonald made following Phillips’ arrest.

    Instead, Cunningham brought those matters out during examination of McDonald on the stand. In its written opinion, the court quoted extensively from Cunningham’s questioning of McDonald.

    The court found no error in either case, ruling the procedure to provide representation as expeditiously as possible to potential capital defendants does not alter previously approved procedures that permits waiving constitutional rights.

    Justices said that they “ … do not find that any testimony attorney Cunningham could have offered … would have had an effect on the jury’s findings … “ and found no showing of ineffective counsel resulting from it.

    “I am disappointed the Supreme Court upheld the conviction,” Cunningham said after learning of the ruling. “This was a tragedy for all concerned, and undoubtedly the most difficult case I ever tried.”

    In its written opinion the court summarized events surrounding four murders at Carolina Lakes between Carthage and Cameron on Dec. 19, 2003. Jurors found Phillips committed three murders and participated in the fourth.

    In its summary, the court said:

    In the early morning hours of 19 December 2003, Fayetteville police notified Phillips that his brother had been shot. Phillips, who had been drinking heavily in addition to using marijuana and Ecstasy the night before, apparently assumed his brother was dead and continued to consume alcohol and drugs after hearing the news. Later that morning, Phillips, his girlfriend Renee McLaughlin (McLaughlin), and his friend Sean Ray drove to Moore County to tell Phillips’s mother about the shooting. Afterwards, they visited Daryl Hobson at the Carolina Lakes Trailer Park in Carthage to buy more marijuana. Hobson had none for sale but accompanied them to the nearby mobile home belonging to Eddie Ryals, who he understood had drugs. There they met twenty-one-year-old Ryals, his fifteen-year-old girlfriend Amanda Cooke (at the time of trial Amanda Cooke Varner) 18-year-old Carl Justice and 19-year-old Joseph Harden.

    Cooke testified that after thirty to thirty-five minutes of conversation, Ryals stood up to use the bathroom, turning his back to Phillips for the first time. Phillips pulled a pistol from his trousers, asked where Ryals’ money and drugs were, then opened fire, shooting Ryals once in the chest and once in the abdomen. He also shot Justice once in the chest. When Ryals fell, Phillips kicked him, then grabbed Ryals’ shotgun from the corner of the room and beat him in the face with it, demanding money and drugs. Cooke’s trial testimony described a chaotic scene, and Ryals’ autopsy revealed that he was also stabbed in the neck during the melee. Ryals repeatedly said he had nothing and they could take what they wanted. He also asked them not to hurt Cooke.

    Phillips turned to approach Harden, who was sitting in a chair across the room, and shot him in the chest. At some point, Harden also suffered a nonfatal stab wound to the chest. Phillips reloaded his revolver, inserting individual shells into the cylinder without apparent difficulty.

    Phillips, McLaughlin, and Ray instructed Cooke and Hobson to move to the kitchen, where the doors to the outside were less accessible. Phillips and Ray dragged Ryals to the kitchen, and Ray told Cooke and Hobson to lie down on the floor. After instructing Ray and McLaughlin to make sure Cooke and Hobson did not move, Phillips went through Ryals’ residence searching for drugs and money.

    Cooke pleaded to be released, claiming she had a baby, but Phillips told her to shut up and that they could not leave any witnesses. Cooke asked McLaughlin if she could go to the bathroom, but Phillips told McLaughlin to refuse the request, adding that Cooke should urinate on herself.

    Someone knocked on the door of Ryals’ trailer, and Ray put his hand over Cooke’s mouth and told her not to say a word. After the knocking stopped, Phillips handed Ray a kitchen knife and told him to deal with Cooke and Hobson so that Phillips would not be the only person in trouble. Phillips shot Hobson in the neck at point-blank range and Ray stabbed Hobson in the chest, inflicting a fatal wound. (The evidence in the record is conflicting as to the order in which these wounds were inflicted on Hobson.)

    Ray then tried to slip his hand down inside Cooke’s shirt. When she threw him off and rose to her feet, Phillips saw them struggling and, from a distance of approximately five feet, shot Cooke twice, once in the chest and once in the side, causing her to fall. Phillips gave Ray another knife and ordered him to “finish [Cooke] off.” Ray stabbed Cooke once and began to get up from the floor, but when Phillips expressed scorn, Ray stabbed her more than twenty times.

    Cooke wavered in and out of consciousness but observed Phillips and the others pouring gasoline in Ryals’ residence and setting it afire. Phillips, McLaughlin, and Ray left the residence, although Ray paused long enough to grab Cooke by the hair and slash her throat. Once they were gone, Cooke crawled out the back door and around to the front yard. She saw an open bed pickup truck approaching and, briefly believing help was at hand, closed her eyes. Instead, she heard Phillips and Ray say they were going to kill her and, looking up, saw that Phillips, Ray, and McLaughlin had emerged from the truck.

    Phillips and Ray placed Cooke in the back of the truck amid several bags of garbage, and Phillips then drove the truck around a corner and backed up to a trash pile. When the truck bogged down in sand and the sirens of approaching fire trucks could be heard, Phillips, Ray, and McLaughlin fled, abandoning Cooke in the truck.

    Cooke survived her ordeal, though she was hospitalized for thirteen days and endured numerous surgeries. Ryals, Hobson, Justice, and Harden died. Their bodies were recovered from Ryals’ residence after Cameron Fire Department firefighters extinguished the blaze. Autopsies revealed that Harden died as a result of a gunshot wound to the heart, Hobson died from stab wounds to his chest, Ryals died as a result of being both shot in and stabbed in the heart, and Justice died from of a gunshot wound to the heart. Phillips was apprehended a few hours later in his mother’s mobile home, across the street from Ryals’ residence.

    Later that day, Phillips gave a detailed confession to Detective Sergeant Timothy Davis of the Moore County Sheriff’s Department. In his statement, Phillips said that he shot Ryals and another male with a shotgun and Hobson and another male with a pistol. He further stated that Ray stabbed the victims after Phillips shot them “to make sure that they were dead.”

    http://www.thepilot.com/news/2011/ju...ntence-upheld/

  4. #4
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    In today's United States Supreme Court orders, Phillips' petition for a writ of certiorari and motion for leave to proceed in forma pauperis were DENIED.

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