Md. inmate killed 4 days before rape conviction tossed

2-16-2017 Maryland:

HAGERSTOWN, Md. -- Roger Largent, 69, will never get a chance to clear his name in the rape of a disabled woman: He was found beaten to death in his prison cell four days before a court tossed his conviction.

Authorities suspect Largent’s cellmate in the slaying, but they have not cited a motive or filed charges in the Saturday attack.

Maryland State Police spokesman Greg Shipley said Monday that the state medical examiner’s office has ruled Largent’s death a homicide, CBS Baltimore reports. He died from blunt force trauma to the head.

On Wednesday, a Maryland appeals court threw out Largent’s conviction and said he should get a new trial because the jury verdict last year hinged largely on a prosecution witness’ improper testimony.

The assault happened in 2015 when Largent went to the mentally disabled woman’s house to give her and her blind husband a ride to a doctor’s appointment. The woman testified at trial that Largent walked up behind her, covered her mouth, pulled down her pants and raped her in the kitchen while her husband was upstairs.

Man mistaken for child molester yells during fatal beating, ‘I have kids. It’s not me’

9-22-2016 Georgia:

While being beaten to death, mistaken for a man his alleged attackers believed had molested a young girl, Sylvester Harden Jr. screamed, “I didn’t do this. I have kids. It’s not me,” a Bibb County prosecutor said at a Thursday hearing.

Ceyunta Cater, one of three people charged with murder in Harden’s 2015 death, stood in a Bibb jail courtroom Thursday, asking a judge to lower his bond. In jail since Feb. 19, 2015, his bond had been set at $275,000.

His attorney, John Carter, said the case has been postponed from the trial calendar because he and the prosecutor assigned to the case have been “diligently working, trying to resolve” it.

Authorities have said an 11-year-old girl called family members Feb. 19, 2015, saying 30-year-old Levi Moss had showed her a pornographic video on his cellphone and molested her.

The girl’s grandmother and other family reached out to relatives in Macon, trying to find someone to go get the child.

Father gets 35-80 year prison term for murdering 15-year-old son

4-15-2010 Michigan:

Jamar Pinkney Sr. was sentenced this morning serve a 35- to 80-year prison term for murdering his son because he believed the boy had molested his half sister.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Brian Sullivan also ordered Pinkney to serve an addition two years for using a firearm in a felony.

Pinkey, 38, was convicted last week for the fatal shooting of his son, Jamar Jr., in November.

The elder Pinkney beat and stripped the 15-year-old boy naked and forced outside his Highland Park home into a vacant lot where he shot his son in the face at point-blank range.

With body on the floor, suspects in Belfair homicide came back the next day to steal items

5-29-15 Washington:

SHELTON — A man being held on suspicion of murder for shooting a Belfair man last weekend told investigators he had accused the victim of being a pedophile and, when confronted, the victim lunged at him so he shot him in the head.

Daniel A. Dunn, 35, of Belfair, also is believed to have returned to Charles Albion Austin’s residence the next day, Sunday, and taken a number of items. Christopher G. Redfern, 27, of Port Orchard, also was arrested in connection with Austin’s death, although Dunn told investigators Redfern was not involved in the shooting.

Austin, 51, was found by a neighbor Monday at his residence on the 100 block of Southridge Drive in Belfair.

Although Dunn said he told Austin he intended to call police to report him for “weird” conversations, when investigators asked why Dunn didn’t go to police to report the shooting, Dunn said he didn’t want to go to jail.

Clues left at Austin’s house led investigators to Dunn and Redfern, said Mason County Sheriff’s Detective Bill Adam.

Neither man has been charged in Austin’s death. However, they appeared Thursday in Superior Court, and Judge Toni Sheldon found probable cause to hold both. Sheldon set $1 million bail for Dunn and $500,000 for Redfern, said Prosecutor Mike Dorcy.

Advocates push for retrial to clear name of 14-year-old 'killer' executed in 1944

See "Blog Tips" and second story -this post- highlighting which would bring this case into the realm of a sex offense. i.e., an accused sex offender. See also movie "Carolina Skeletons" If circumstances prove otherwise the case will be removed from blog.

12-1-2013 South Carolina:

The 95-pound boy wore stripes as the sheriffs walked him to the electric chair, sat him on books to prop him up, and electrocuted him in June 1944.

Nearly 70 years after the execution of 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. for the killing of two white girls, advocates have taken the unprecedented step of asking a South Carolina court to grant a new trial to clear his name.

Stinney is often cited as the youngest person executed in this country in the 20th century. For years, family, advocates and lawyers have said that South Carolina put an innocent boy to death.

“We just want what is right,” said Ray Brown, a filmmaker who is writing a script based on Stinney’s story and recently joined efforts to persuade the state to grant a new trial.

The effort stems from the brutal slaying of Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 8, in the spring of 1944. Stinney and his younger sister were the last witnesses known to have seen the girls alive. Police in Alcolu, S.C., arrested Stinney the day the girls were found, and an all-white jury convicted him on the basis of what police described as a confession. Less than three months after the crime, Stinney went to the chair.

"We want them to consider the possibility that he was wrongly convicted and executed for something he did not do," said Brown, who describes the case as a symbol of our history’s deep racial injustices. "You have to correct these kind of things if you ever expect any change."

The request for a new trial is the culmination of a lengthy investigation, started years ago by local historian George Frierson, whose work brought attention to what he calls the barbaric death of a child.

“This was a courthouse lynching,” said Frierson. “I want his name cleared, and I want an apology from the state of South Carolina for putting a child to death.”

Stinney’s execution was legal at the time in South Carolina, where 14 was the age of criminal responsibility. In 2005, the U.S. abolished execution of children under 18.