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Thread: Marvin Louis Guy Sentenced to Life in Prison in 2014 TX Murder of Police Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie

  1. #21
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Waiting game: Guy's long wait typical in murder cases

    By Josh Sullivan
    The Killeen Herald

    Marvin Louis Guy has been in the Bell County Jail without a trial date set for nearly three years. Some in the community have wondered if that’s an unusually long wait.

    Guy is accused of killing Detective Charles D. Dinwiddie, the leader of Killeen’s SWAT team, as a no-knock search warrant was executed at his home. He awaits his capital murder trial, in which Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza announced in September 2014 that he would seek the death penalty.

    Guy was indicted on June 18, 2014. That was a little over a month after he was arrested.

    Guy is not the outlier here. Of six people charged with 2014 murders, two entered plea bargains and were sentenced. Another, Damarcus Kardel Bronner, is serving 25 years for murder.

    But Thomas Jeremy Jones, who was indicted on May 7, 2014, and charged with the stabbing death of Kirsten Farr in an IHOP parking lot, and Andrew Leonard Hardesty, who was indicted on Dec. 16 in the murder of Christine Watkins, both await trial dates in the Bell County Jail.

    The Herald spoke with several lawyers who work in Bell County, as well as District Attorney Henry Garza. The common opinion among all of them, is that three years isn’t an unheard of amount of time to wait for a trial.

    Sometimes, that’s even a part of the defense attorney’s plan.

    Jim Kreimeyer has been a criminal defense attorney in Killeen for decades, and spent another 25 years as a judge. Ed Laughlin, another local attorney, called him the dean of the criminal defense attorneys in this area.

    “He’s forgotten more about law than most people around here have learned,” Laughlin said.

    Before Kreimeyer discussed murder trials, he referenced Percy Foreman, one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in Texas. Foreman represented James Earl Ray in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and claims that out of 1,500 death penalty cases he handled, only 53 were sentenced to death.

    “Percy Foreman always said that he never had a client convicted that didn’t go to trial,” Kreimeyer said. “You can hurry up, but it isn’t necessarily in the best interest of the defendant, because as things go on, things change.”

    Kreimeyer said that with all the different pieces that go into a murder trial — ballistics evidence, DNA tests, witnesses — lawyers typically don’t want to rush through the pretrial process. Not only the outcome of a case, but the reputation of a lawyer depends upon him or her having every single bit of piece of information possible, so there are no surprises once the trial begins.

    “Nobody should be in a hurry to get the case over with because as long as they don’t got to trial, they aren’t convicted,” Kreimeyer said.

    Though that might be conventional thinking for a lawyer, it’s difficult to get that point across to a defendant who sits in jail awaiting trial, especially one who believes he or she is innocent.

    Michael White is a defense attorney who joined Garza on a conference call to the Herald Friday afternoon. He was also Guy’s attorney, before a disagreement led to Guy’s request for another. White said that most of the time, a defendant doesn’t understand the process. Often, the defendant feels as if a lawyer is biding the state more time to build up a better prosecution.

    “You have clients who want the most favorable result, but if you go as fast as you can toward that result, you’re going to get blindsided,” White said. “You have to constantly ask the prosecutors if there’s any new information, or they’ll have an expert that comes up with a new conclusion, or they’ll find a video that exists just a week or two before trial. You have to be extremely more thorough now than three or four years ago.”

    Sometimes, that long wait period will cause a rift between an attorney and a defendant. The defendant will feel as if his attorney isn’t doing enough to help, and the attorney grows weary of his or her client yelling at him or her meeting after meeting.

    Often, the judge will grant the defendant the opportunity to get another attorney. But once that happens, the whole process is “basically at square one again,” as Garza puts it.

    A disagreement led Judge John Gauntt to allow Guy to switch attorneys. White originally pursued the possibility that Guy may have an intellectual disability. But in an interview with the New York Times’ Kevin Sack, White said that Guy refused to accept that theory, and instead wanted him to pursue a theory that relied on the idea that Dinwiddie was killed by friendly fire.

    “Usually, a defendant can’t get it out of his own head; it’s not easy to get across,” White said in his interview with the Herald.

    Garza said that in his experience, a typical wait period between indictment by a grand jury and a trial date set is 12 to 24 months. White said 12 to 36 months is a more accurate representation of the time frame in his experience.

    Garza cited the Michael Morton Act as something that’s led to a more drawn out process. In 2013, The Texas Legislature enacted a measure that required prosecutors to give defense attorneys any evidence that is relevant to the defendant’s guilt or punishment. Garza said that’s prolonged things by about six months to a year.

    “It didn’t have much teeth in it in the beginning,” said White. “The problem is that the DAs can be ineffective if we don’t get everything, and with appeal attorneys, I’m starting to be put out on the witness stand a lot more than I have ever had to before.”

    A newfound complexity that surrounds forensics can be blamed as well. When Garza tried murder cases back in the 1980s and 1990s, a murder case could be disposed in 10 to 14 months. Some of that can be blamed on the increase in population. Killeen’s population was around 63,000 in 1990. Now, it hovers above 140,000, and Bell County as a whole is around 335,000.

    Much of it, however, can be attributed to the increase in technology.

    “DNA didn’t come into admissibility and it wasn’t used to the great extent that it is today,” he said, “It’s much more prevalent in any investigation today than it was in the early ’90s, but you’ve also had an increase in a number of cases.”

    Austin Shell is an attorney based out of Marble Falls, who said he’s represented a number of people charged with murder in the past. Three years, he said, seems like a long time, especially if the defendant is in prison.

    “My opinion is that that’s excessive,” he said in a phone call. “Especially if that person is in jail and has their liberty restrained. If they’re out on bond, I have a little more tolerance, because not if they’re not in jail, their liberty is not restrained as much.”

    Garza declined to compare the wait time in Bell County to other areas of either the state or the country, but White said that he has represented defendants in Lampasas County and Harris County in addition to Bell County, and he said that wait time is consistent across the board.

    Laughlin thinks that the wait in Texas might be on the shorter end.

    “You get to a city like Chicago, and there might be a three- to five-year wait to get to a jury trial,” he said.

    There is no statute of limitations on a murder trial; therefore, there is no real clock that prosecutors are up against.

    http://kdhnews.com/news/crime/waitin...31262b6f1.html

  2. #22
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    October 20, 2017

    Trial date set for man accused of killing Killeen police officer

    KILLEEN, Texas (KWTX) - A trial date has been set for a Killeen man who is accused of killing a Killeen police officer during a stand-off at a Killeen apartment complex in 2014.

    Judge John Gauntt, in 27th District Court in Belton, set Marvin Guy for trial on a capital murder charge on January 17, 2018.

    Guy, 52, is charged with capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder in connection with the May 9, 2014 shooting death of Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie while Dinwiddie and other SWAT officers were attempting to serve a “no knock” search warrant.

    Jury selection is set to begin on January 17, 2018 and it, because of the nature of the charge, could take three to six weeks, District Attorney Henry Garza has said.

    State law requires prospective jurors who could be selected to sit on a jury that is to decide a death penalty issue must be interviewed individually as the selection process takes place.

    Bell County officials have not yet said how many panel members they plan to call for the selection.

    The trial date setting took more than three years to reach, during which time Guy has remained in custody in the Bell County Jail facing a total bond of $4.5 million.

    http://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Tri...451854333.html

  3. #23
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    January 9, 2018

    Killeen man accused of killing KPD detective won’t go to trial next week

    By Josh Sullivan
    kdhnews.com

    Jury selection in the capital murder trial of Marvin Louis Guy — the Killeen man charged with killing one police detective and shooting at others — will not begin next week as planned.

    The January 17 jury trial date has been cancelled, according to 27th District Court Coordinator Jessica Bridge. The court does not yet have a rescheduled date.

    Bridge said she did not know why the court is rescheduling the trial date.

    Guy is accused of killing police Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie during an exchange of gunfire during a SWAT raid at his apartment in 2014. He is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder after he exchanged gunfire during an early-morning “no-knock” warrant at the apartment on Circle M Drive in Killeen on May 9, 2014. That led to Dinwiddie, a leader on the police department’s special weapons and tactics team, being fatally shot in the face.

    In past interviews, Guy has said that he believed his home was being broken into during the 5 a.m. raid, and he began shooting in self defense.

    Guy’s attorneys, Carlos Garcia and Anthony Smith, have previously stated that they were not ready for trial, as the two took over the case from Michael White after a disagreement. The two also said they were awaiting evidence to come from the prosecution. In December, the two sides met behind closed doors in Judge John Gauntt’s courtroom, but were not able to discuss details due to a gag order on the case, imposed by Gauntt in September 2015.

    http://kdhnews.com/news/crime/killee...39de01dcd.html

  4. #24
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    Accused Killeen police-killer Marvin Guy in court, but still no trial set

    By Emily Hilley-Sierzchula
    The Killeen Herald

    BELTON — The widow of the Killeen detective and SWAT officer who was killed on May 9, 2014, looked on as Marvin Louis Guy, the man accused of the slaying, was in court for a status hearing Thursday.

    It was lawyers and Judge John Gauntt who did all the talking in the 27th Judicial District Court, however, as the killing of Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie is not resolved and no trial date has been set.

    Henry Garza, Bell County district attorney, is trying the case for the state, along with Fred Burns, assistant district attorney.

    Garza and Guy’s lead lawyer, Carlos Garcia, attempted to hammer out a trial date, to no avail.

    “We’re ready, we’ve been ready, we’re ready to go; give us a date,” Garza said to Gauntt.

    Instead, both sides agreed to have another status hearing on Aug. 9.

    Guy, who could face the death penalty if convicted, is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder after he exchanged gunfire during an early-morning “no-knock” warrant at his apartment on Circle M Drive in Killeen more than four years ago.

    Dinwiddie was fatally shot and two other police officers were wounded during the raid.

    In past interviews, Guy has said that he believed his home was being broken into during the 5 a.m. raid, and he began shooting in self-defense.

    Guy, in black-rimmed glasses and clad in an orange jumpsuit, sat leaning forward with his hand resting over his mouth, as attorneys discussed their schedules.

    During the hearing, Gauntt said the goal of the hearing was “a status review to see where we are and see if we can get a date set.”

    One of the delays was due to reports. Neither side received two reports from the court. The court coordinator located one of the reports and handed copies to both sides.

    Garza would not say what the report concerned. In a previous hearing, Gauntt placed a gag order on the case.

    http://kdhnews.com/news/crime/accuse...f1b7d80ef.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #25
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Justice goes so slow, I wonder sometimes how we are going to deal all of our inmates in death row.
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    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  6. #26
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    If what has been reported is correct, there’s no way this guy should be in jail, let alone facing a death penalty trial. The Magee case didn’t even go past the grand jury and yet this guys case is still active 4 years later. The only difference between them was the police were actually correct about Magee growing weed unlike here.

  7. #27
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    I'm amazed that they haven't knocked down the charges on this yet. Unless they have evidence that he knew they were cops,then this is a shame that its taking years for this case to see the light of day.

  8. #28
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    Attorneys await competency report in Killeen capital murder case

    By Emily Hilley-Sierzchula
    The Killeen Herald

    BELTON — No trial date was set during a status hearing in the Marvin Louis Guy capital murder case on Thursday afternoon, as attorneys for both the state and defense await one of two expert reports.

    State District Judge John Gauntt, who presides over the 27th District Court, said he has not received the second report. One report was distributed to the prosecution and defense at the last status hearing in the case, in July.

    The reports concern whether Guy, 53, is competent to stand trial, according to court proceedings.

    Guy was booked into the Bell County Jail on May 10, 2014, after a Killeen detective was killed while the SWAT team served an early morning “no-knock” narcotics warrant at Guy’s apartment on Circle M Drive in Killeen on May 9.

    Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie, a detective and KPD SWAT team leader, died a few days after being shot during the raid, and three other officers were shot and survived.

    In past interviews, Guy has said that he believed his home was being broken into during the 5 a.m. raid, and he began shooting in self-defense.

    Guy is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder and is in jail with $4.5 million in bonds.

    Guy’s lead lawyer, Carlos Garcia, said he expected the second report to be emailed to Gauntt by Thursday afternoon, and the judge promised to distribute the report to both sides when received.

    Henry Garza, Bell County district attorney, is trying the case for the state, along with Fred Burns, assistant district attorney.

    In a previous hearing, Gauntt placed a gag order on the case.

    The attorneys agreed to have another status hearing on Aug. 30.

    http://www.tdtnews.com/news/article_...40b98c5a7.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #29
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    August 30, 2018

    Jury selection in capital murder case to start next year

    By Emily Hilley-Sierzchula
    The Killeen Daily Herald

    BELTON — A date has been set to start the jury selection process in the capital murder trial of a man accused of killing a Killeen Police Department detective four years ago, and wounding three other officers.

    During a status hearing on Thursday, with phone calendars in hand, the district attorney and several assistant district attorneys, and the two lawyers representing Marvin Guy, decided that two jury panels will be considered on Feb. 26 and 27, followed by individual jury interviews in March.

    Potential jurors will fill out a questionnaire as part of the process.

    The case will be heard in the 27th Judicial District Court of Judge John Gauntt.

    Guy, 53, was booked into the Bell County Jail on May 10, 2014, after a Killeen detective was fatally shot while the SWAT team served a 5 a.m. “no-knock” narcotics warrant at Guy’s apartment on Circle M Drive in Killeen on May 9.

    Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie, a detective and KPD SWAT team leader, died a few days after being shot during the raid, and three other officers were shot and survived.

    In past interviews, Guy has said that he believed his home was being broken into during the raid, and he began shooting in self-defense.

    At the last status hearing, attorneys discussed reports regarding competency, but those reports were not mentioned in this hearing. Gauntt previously placed a gag order on the case.

    Guy is being charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder. He is being held in the Bell County Jail on $4.5 million in bonds.

    http://kdhnews.com/news/crime/jury-s...9c2cfccd3.html

  10. #30
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mastro Titta's Avatar
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    I don't how can this guy be found guilty of capital murder by a jury (and a fortiori be sentenced to death). He was sleeping in his bed when out of nowhere someone broke into his house (correct me if I'm wrong, but during no-knock raids officers don't qualify themselves), hence I think it would be legitimate to believe what he said, that he mistook officers for thieves. I mean, if I were a juror in his trial, I would vote not guilty.

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