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Thread: Azibo Aquart - Federal

  1. #11
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Judge throws out charges in triple murder in Conn.

    A federal judge has thrown out charges against a man in connection with the 2005 killings of three people in Bridgeport in a turf dispute over crack cocaine sales.

    Judge Janet Bond Arterton dismissed three counts of murder in aid of racketeering Monday against Efrain Johnson, one of four men convicted in the crime. Arterton ruled that while there may be ample evidence to support a felony murder conviction, there was insufficient evidence at trial to show Johnson was part of an organized criminal enterprise or that he participated in exchange for something of monetary value.

    Johnson was convicted last year and faced a mandatory life prison sentence. He still faces state felony murder charges.

    Prosecutors are reviewing the ruling, said Tom Carson, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

    Johnson, who remains in custody, knew nothing about the drug trafficking enterprise that was the subject of the federal prosecution, said his attorney, Todd Bussert.

    "We have thus long felt that as to him, the case was improperly brought in federal court," Bussert wrote in an email. "Mr. Johnson is extremely thankful that the court recognized the merits of his position and is optimistic that justice will be served as the case proceeds in state court."

    In December, Arterton sentenced Azibo Aquart to death for the killings. Aquart became the first federal court defendant in Connecticut to receive the death penalty since federal capital punishment was reinstated in 1988. Aquart's lawyer vowed to appeal the sentence.

    Aquart, his brother, Johnson and another man were convicted in the killings of 43-year-old Tina Johnson, 40-year-old James Reid and 54-year-old Basil Williams, who were beaten to death with baseball bats on Aug. 24, 2005, and found bound with duct tape in Tina Johnson's apartment.

    Authorities said Tina Johnson had been selling crack cocaine in Aquart's drug turf in the Charles Street Apartments without his permission. Prosecutors said Aquart and his associates were involved in numerous acts of violence to maintain control over their drug selling activities in the apartment complex.

    Under the federal law, prosecutors had to prove Efrain Johnson was connected to the enterprise in a meaningful way to promote its illegal activities and committed the killings in exchange for a payment.

    Arterton cited trial testimony that Johnson drove Aquart to the apartment building, brought baseball bats, wore gloves and a mask, burst into the apartment, tied up Tina Johnson with duct tape and stood near the door of a bedroom while the Aquart brothers killed two of the victims.

    Despite that evidence, Arterton said there was no evidence that Johnson was voluntarily and intentionally associating with Aquart as the head of the drug dealing enterprise, saying he didn't even know the enterprise existed. The judge also ruled that a small amount of marijuana Johnson received earlier for a favor was not enough to prove he committed the crime in exchange for receiving something of monetary value.

    "There is nothing in the record to show that defendant's association with Azibo Aquart that night was more than a personal association," Arterton wrote, adding that "no reasonable juror could have concluded that Mr. Johnson was connected in a 'meaningful way' to the Aquart enterprise, even though he brought the bats, heard Aquart complain about 'people selling drugs in his building' and duct taped Tina Johnson's wrists, because he did not even know the Aquart enterprise existed..."

    Aquart's brother, Azikiwe Aquart, and another associate, John Taylor, pleaded guilty to racketeering murder and are serving life prison sentences.

    http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/cr...nn-4654819.php
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  2. #12
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    Trial to start for man accused of killing 3 people in alleged Bridgeport drug feud


    BRIDGEPORT, Connecticut (AP) — A man charged in the killings of three people during an alleged Bridgeport drug turf dispute in 2005 is going on trial in state court.

    A Bridgeport Superior Court jury is scheduled to begin hearing evidence Friday in the case of 31-year-old Efrain Johnson, who is charged with three counts of felony murder and three counts of kidnapping.

    Authorities say Johnson and three other men took part in the killings of 43-year-old Tina Johnson, 40-year-old James Reid and 54-year-old Basil Williams, who were beaten with baseball bats and found bound with duct tape in Tina Johnson's apartment.

    Prosecutors say Tina Johnson was selling crack cocaine in the drug turf of Efrain Johnson's co-defendant, Azibo Aquart, without Aquart's permission. Aquart was sentenced to death in federal court for the killings.

    http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...dgeport-Deaths

  3. #13
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    Man to be sentenced in Bridgeport triple killing

    BRIDGEPORT (AP) — A Bridgeport man is set to be sentenced for his role in the killings of three people during what police called a drug turf dispute.

    Thirty-one-year-old Efrain Johnson faces up to 85 years on prison when he is sentenced for felony murder and kidnapping Friday in Bridgeport Superior Court. A jury convicted him in December of killing 43-year-old Tina Johnson, but acquitted him in the killings of the other two victims.

    Authorities say Johnson and three other men beat the victims to death in Tina Johnson's Bridgeport apartment in 2005, because Tina Johnson was selling crack cocaine on the drug turf of Efrain Johnson's co-defendant, Azibo Aquart, without permission. Also killed were 40-year-old James Reid and 54-year-old Basil Williams.

    Aquart was sentenced to death in federal court for the killings.

    http://www.norwichbulletin.com/artic...#ixzz2uhLObzrS

  4. #14
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    August 31, 2016

    Connecticut's Last Lightning Strike: Bridgeport Capital Appeal Hits 2nd Circuit

    By ADAM KLASFELD
    Courthouse News Service

    MANHATTAN — Nearly half a century after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart equated U.S. capital punishment with getting "struck by lightning," the appeal of a convicted triple-murderer in Connecticut illustrates the truth of that observation.

    Many death-penalty opponents have argued that the rarity of the penalty makes its cruel and unusual, but the Second Circuit appeared preoccupied Monday with a different question: whether a jury condemned Azibo Aquart based on the lie of a government witness.

    When he was sentenced to death in December 2012, Aquart became Connecticut's first federal inmate on death row in decades.

    There had been 11 men on death row in Connecticut at the state level earlier that year. Each has since had his sentence converted into a life term, however, because Connecticut abolished the death penalty in April 2012.

    But Aquart's case is rare, even by the standards of federal capital punishment.

    In their brief to the Second Circuit, Aquart's attorneys note that only 2 percent of all 3,911 federal death-eligible cases resolved to date have led to such a sentence.

    The statistic is mentioned after a reference to the late Justice Stewart's famous lightning remark in Furman v. Georgia, a 1972 case that began the country's de facto 16-year moratorium on the federal death penalty.

    Though President Ronald Reagan reinstated executions in 1988 with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Aquart's marks the first appearance of such a sentence in Connecticut since that time.

    It follows a typical pattern of the death penalty in the United States. Like most federal death-row prisoners, Aquart — who also goes by the nicknames "Dreddy" and "D" — is black.

    Federal prosecutors contend that the Department of Justice's charging decision toward Aquart is not unfair or racist, but a reflection of the "heinous" crimes on Aug. 24, 2005, when Aquart bludgeoned three people in Bridgeport with a baseball bat.

    "He brought a murder kit to a murder," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacabed Rodriguez-Coss told the Second Circuit's three-judge panel Monday.

    The government says Aquart had been selling crack cocaine out of his apartment at 215 Charles St., and was angered by competition from another resident, Tina Johnson.

    Joined by three accomplices, Aquart broke into Johnson's apartment, restrained its three occupants and beat them to death. They left bodies in the apartment and drilled its door shut.

    "Yo, Come Get You Some"

    Of the four men charged for the triple-murder, Aquart alone faced a capital trial. A key government witness had been crucial in depicting Aquart as the crew's sadistic leader.

    John Taylor told the jury that he saw Aquart "bashing" Johnson "like he was at a meat cleaver — that he was at a meat market, beating them."

    In another chilling remark, Taylor claimed Aquart invited him to join in by saying: "Yo, come get you some."

    Prosecutors contend that DNA and fingerprints make up a trail of forensic evidence that corroborates Taylor's story as well, but Aquart's attorneys say there is good reason to disbelieve the witness's account.

    Though Taylor had been facing three possible life sentences at the time, his cooperation earned him a sentence of just nine years in prison.

    Aquart's attorney Beverly Van Ness said Taylor knew he would get leniency for his cooperation, but he burnished his credibility with the jury by saying he expected to die in prison.

    "I don't think I'm never going home," Taylor said at trial, before breaking into tears.

    U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Wesley appeared skeptical of Van Ness' argument.

    Interpreting Taylor's remarks as an expression of his hopes and fears, Wesley noted that Taylor also told the jury that he hoped the judge would show him leniency.

    "So, I don't understand how you parse that answer into some kind of lie," Wesley said. "He doesn't know. He doesn't know. There's no promise. What's he lying to? He should have said, 'I hope to go home today, but I'm not certain I ever will?'"

    U.S. Circuit Judge Reena Raggi, who spent 15 years as a trial judge in the Eastern District of New York, wondered why Aquart's attorneys did not try to test Taylor's prediction during cross-examination.

    Every defense attorney can name a cooperating witness who got a sweetheart deal, and Raggi invoked a famous mob snitch tried in her former courthouse: Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, who got a five-year sentence for testifying against John Gotti.

    Van Ness replied that the defense did not know at the time about a generous sentence dealt to another cooperating witness in Connecticut.

    Their skepticism aside, the judges agreed that Taylor's testimony played a critical role in the prosecution. Judge Wesley called him the witness the "lynchpin" of the government's case.

    Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Lee Dayton, who also served as one of the trial prosecutors, emphasized the strength of the forensic evidence and phone records, but she acknowledged that Taylor "was an incredibly important witness."

    Dayton told the court that Taylor's testimony even surprised her.

    "I expected him to say, 'I don't know; it's up to the judge,'" the prosecutor said.

    Instead, she said, Taylor's direct examination ended when the witness started crying and reached for tissues.

    Taylor may have been wrong about his expected sentence, but Dayton insisted that he had been sincere. This prompted Raggi to ask why the prosecutor had not questioned Taylor about his mistaken belief.

    "This was your lead cooperator," Raggi emphasized. "I wonder whether the government thought that he expected that he thought he would never go home, or if he didn't know."

    Dayton answered: "I don't believe we had a duty to clarify that at that point."

    "The Whole Thing Is Very Unusual"

    The final member of the panel, Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi, seemed disturbed that the prosecution washed its hands of this responsibility.

    "Let me tell you something that is bothering me," he told the prosecutor. "Seeking a death penalty in a case like this is quite unusual. This was done here, and I take it that it was done because basically, you believed that Taylor was fundamentally telling the truth as to what happened."

    Calibresi questioned whether, in that judgment, the prosecutors had taken over the role of the jury.

    "I'm being maybe more open than I should be, but that's what's bothering me about this case, because the whole thing is very unusual," he said.

    The 83-year-old jurist took long view of the history of this punishment, remarking that one person had been executed for Aquart's crime federally in half a century, and "maybe three people have" in the past 90 years.

    Dayton had been quick to point out that she played no role in the charging decision, which the Department of Justice made through a process going right up to the U.S. attorney general.

    Prosecutors argued in a brief last year that the Second Circuit has no power to decide whether the rarity of the death penalty causes it to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment.

    "If the law is to change on this issue, that change must come from the Supreme Court," Connecticut U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly wrote.

    In nearly two hours of oral arguments, Aquart's attorneys largely avoided pressing this constitutional attack. Should the U.S. Supreme Court eventually hear Aquart's case, the uniqueness of the case could interest Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote a famous dissent in 2015 that says the death penalty's declining usage provides all the more reason to abolish it.

    Meanwhile, Judge Calibresi ended proceedings by asking attorneys to submit further briefings considering a syllogism: that capital punishment is cruel and unusual, where it is unusual.

    "It would suggest that capital punishment might not be cruel or unusual in those states that apply it with sufficient frequency to a particular crime that it is not arbitrary, but might be cruel or unusual in those particular states where it's done once in a blue moon for some reasons," he asked.

    Judge Raggi, who led the panel, noted that she and Calabresi had been debating federalism and the death penalty since U.S. v. Fell, which allowed federal prosecutors to dismiss jurors who oppose capital punishment in states that ban it.

    While Raggi wrote the majority opinion in that case, Calabresi argued in a dissent that a jury of one's peers "entails the right to be tried by a set of people who truly represent the point of view of a state and district."

    Whether the old fault lines will re-emerge in Aquart's case remains to be seen. The Second Circuit reserved decision on Monday, inviting further arguments from the parties in written briefings through November.

    http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/0...nd-circuit.htm

  5. #15
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Death row reprieve in Bridgeport triple murder

    By Michael P. Mayko
    LMT Online

    A Bridgeport man sitting on federal death row for the past six years following his conviction for ordering the 2005 brutal baseball bat triple murder that outraged a community has won a reprieve —at least for now.

    A three-judge panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York has set aside the death penalty imposed on Azibo Aquart as a result of his 2011 conviction for beating two of three people mummified in duct tape with baseball bats in their Charles Street, Bridgeport, apartment on Aug. 24, 2005.

    Senior U.S. Circuit Judges Guido Calabresi, Richard Wesley and Reena Raggi upheld the conviction of Azibo Aquart but vacated his death penalty sentence.

    The 146-page ruling, written by Raggi, orders Senior U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in New Haven to conduct a new sentencing hearing on the death penalty.

    No date has been set for that hearing.

    Aquart, 37, who moved to Bridgeport from Stamford, received a federal death penalty sentence for the conviction. He has been sitting on death row in the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison since his sentencing.

    The appeals court vacated the death penalty after finding prosecutorial misconduct during the cross-examination of now retired FBI Special Agent Chris Munger in the death penalty hearing.

    Munger testified about the various accounts, contradictions and discrepancies Efrain Johnson, one of the four participants in the murder, allegedly provided investigators.

    “Asking Agent Munger whether law enforcement authorities had already determined that Efrain Johnson was lying in these statements impermissibly intruded on the jury’s exclusive responsibility for determining credibility,” Raggi wrote.

    “This inquiry ran afoul of established law holding that cross-examination cannot be used to direct the jury to trust the government’s judgment rather than its own view of the evidence,” she explained in the decision. “...We cannot confidently conclude that the jury would have returned a death penalty verdict absent these errors.”

    The three-judge panel did uphold the constitutionality of applying the federal death penalty laws in the case.

    Thomas Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said government lawyers are reviewing the lengthy decision that was released Dec. 20 —some 22 months after the case was argued.

    Neither Michael A. Sheehan, one of Aquart’s court-appointed lawyers during the trial, nor Sean Bolser, a lawyer with the Federal Appellate Resource Counsel Project in New York who represented Aquart on the appeal, could be reached for comment Christmas Eve.

    Following a five-week 2011 trial in New Haven federal court, Aquart was convicted on eight charges including three involving the Violent Crimes in Aid of Racketeering Act and three involving the operation of a continuing criminal enterprise. The remaining charges involved drug distribution.

    Killed were Tina Johnson, a 43-year-old home health care aide who dabbled in crack sales and was considered by Aquart — according to testimony — a threat to his operation; her 40-year-old boyfriend, James Reid, and Basil Williams, a 54-year-old house painter battling alcoholism. Each was hog-tied and covered in duct tape with the only openings being the noses of Reid and Williams and Johnson’s eyes.

    The federal jury convicted Aquart in the murders of Johnson and Williams but could not reach a unanimous decision on his role in Reid’s death. Reid’s death was attributed to Aquart’s brother Azikiwe, who is serving a life sentence.

    “This was not a spontaneous act of violence," then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Dayton, who is now a Connecticut Superior Court judge, told the jury. "This was a well-orchestrated execution." Dayton likened the blood-splattered death scene as more befitting a "slaughterhouse" than an apartment.

    During the trial, federal prosecutors produced witnesses and evidence charging Azibo Aquart with heading a large-scale crack cocaine trafficking operation on the second floor of the Charles Street apartment complex.

    He became aware that Johnson, once one of his customers, according to court documents, was buying and selling small quantities of drugs out of her apartment. After being warned to stop, Johnson allegedly told one of Aquart’s lieutenants that if she could not sell, then no would because she would call police, the documents claim.

    Under the cover of pre-dawn darkness, Azibo Aquart led a group of four men who broke into the apartment, according to trial testimony.

    The men, dressed in black wearing ski masks and vinyl gloves, bolted the door shut from the inside and mummified the trio in duct tape, testimony showed.

    One of the participants, John Taylor, who cooperated with authorities, testified that Azibo grabbed a baseball bat and beat Johnson and Williams to death while his brother battered Reid.

    However Efrain Johnson told investigators Taylor beat Tina Johnson with a metal pipe, according to court documents. Efrain Johnson is serving a 50-year sentence for his role.

    Taylor, who was sentenced to nine years in prison, said at one point Azibo offered him the bat and asked him "if you want some of this."

    Azibo’s court-ordered penalty set-aside is the second such case to come before a court this month, although the cases are dissimilar.

    Richard Roszkowski, sentenced to death in the triple murder of Holly Flannery, her 9-year-old daughter, Kylie, and Good Samaritan Thomas Gaudet on a city street in 2006, also had a reprieve from Death Row, although his sentencing Dec. 6 to consecutive life terms without the possibility of release was because of a change in state law, not because of errors during his trial.

    The now 51-year-old Roszkowski, the last man sentenced to death in the state, became the last one of 11 death-row inmates to be resentenced to life after Connecticut’s state Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty in 2012.

    https://www.lmtonline.com/local/arti...r-13490162.php

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  7. #17
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    On March 7, 2019, the Second Circuit DENIED the United States' petition for en banc rehearing.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketP...tion.Final.pdf

  8. #18
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court DENIED Aquart's certiorari petition as to his murder convictions.

    Lower Ct: United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
    Case Numbers: (12-5086)
    Decision Date: December 20, 2018
    Rehearing Denied: March 7, 2019

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/19-5489.html

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    This guy will also be tossed out of death row the northeast isn’t into the death penalty. They’ve sentenced the least amount of people to death in the country and they’ve executed literally one person since 1976. Michael Ross was the only execution after Furman because he dropped his appeals.
    Last edited by Neil; 07-31-2020 at 03:21 PM.

  10. #20
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    Feds no longer seeking death penalty in triple killing

    By Dave Collins
    Associated Press


    HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Federal prosecutors are no longer seeking the death penalty for a Connecticut drug dealer convicted for his role in the killings of three people beaten to death in a turf dispute over crack cocaine sales.

    The U.S. attorney’s office notified Azibo Aquart’s lawyer about its decision late last month, according to a document filed Tuesday in federal court in New Haven.

    A spokesperson for federal prosecutors in Connecticut had no immediate comment Thursday.

    Aquart, now 39, was sentenced to death in 2012 for the 2005 killings in Bridgeport, becoming the first federal court defendant in Connecticut to receive the death penalty since federal capital punishment was reinstated in 1988.

    But a federal appeals court overturned the sentence in 2018, after finding prosecutorial misconduct during the cross-examination of a now-retired FBI agent. The court, however, upheld Aquart’s convictions for murder in aid of racketeering and other crimes, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. He now faces up to life in prison.

    Aquart was one of four men convicted in the killings of Tina Johnson, James Reid and Basil Williams, who were beaten to death with baseball bats on Aug. 24, 2005, and found bound with duct tape in Johnson’s apartment.

    Prosecutors said Johnson had been selling crack cocaine in Aquart’s drug turf in the Charles Street Apartments without his permission. Aquart and his associates were involved in numerous acts of violence to maintain control over their drug selling activities in the apartment complex, authorities said.

    “Azibo Aquart carried out heinous crimes, and committed horrific acts of violence,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said after Aquart was sentenced to death. “There is no joy on this day — only the recognition that we must continue not only to seek justice for victims of violent crime, but also to do all we can to prevent and deter drug trafficking and the terror that so often accompanies it.”

    Aquart’s lawyer, David Moraghan, had no comment Thursday.

    Nearly 50 men are on federal death row, while Connecticut abolished its death penalty in 2015.

    Former President Donald Trump resumed federal executions last year after a 17-year hiatus and his Justice Department put to death 13 people, an unprecedented run that ended just days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. No president in more than 120 years had overseen as many federal executions. Biden favors eliminating the death penalty.

    Other than Aquart’s case, there are at least three pending federal prosecutions in Connecticut where defendants are eligible for the death penalty, but none in which prosecutors currently are seeking capital punishment, according to Thomas Carson, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office.

    https://apnews.com/article/connectic...71bc6f264a2393
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