One Knoxville Horror Perp Sentenced To Death—But The Time-Bomb Is Ticking

In
the second

Knoxville Horror
murder trial, only one penalty could spell justice for
the victims of Lemaricus Davidson, the man who with an
indeterminate number of accomplices carjacked,
kidnapped, gang-raped, beat, sexually tortured and
murdered Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom,
23: Death.

And
death was indeed the sentence finally meted out to
Davidson on Friday afternoon, by seven male and five
female jurors.

Two days earlier, the jury had

convicted Davidson on
35 out of 38 state felony charges.

The trial was a defeat for Knox County Criminal Court
Judge Richard H. Baumgartner, who had again sought to
subvert justice and save Davidson from the

executioner`s needle,
as he had earlier saved Davidson`s convicted accomplice
and half-brother, Letalvis Cobbins.

In Cobbins` August trial, Judge Baumgartner had abused
the jury selection process, in order to rig the
sentencing options. Although the victims were both
white, and the assailants had committed the atrocity in
a jurisdiction that is

88 percent white and
only 8.8 percent black,
Baumgartner went to 27.5 percent black

Davidson County,
to fetch a majority-black jury, which he bused in to
Knox County. That jury convicted Cobbins of

33 out of 38 felony
charges, but



sentenced him only to “life without parole”.

In Gomer Pyle`s immortal words, “Surprise,
surprise, surprise!”

But in Davidson`s trial, Judge Baumgartner was
confounded by the defendant himself, who

insisted
on being tried before a
Knox County jury. (Davidson`s defense attorneys

wouldn`t say why.)Hence,
only one juror was black.

But
the judge had a last trick left up his sleeve.

Baumgartner made


“Knox County judicial
history”,
in the words of Knoxville News Sentinel reporter
Jamie Satterfield, when he

instructed the jury
that it is


more expensive
to execute a prisoner than to keep him in jail for life.
(Reporter
Satterfield noted that the very study [PDF]
Baumgartner had cited

showed
that
an execution in fact saves taxpayers $770,000 over a
life sentence without parole.)

That a death penalty-eligible


prosecution
is more expensive
than one in which the worst potential sentence is life
without parole is no secret in the Volunteer State.
Tennessee law decrees that each defendant have not one
but two death penalty-certified defense attorneys, and
that there be an automatic appeal in the event of a
death sentence.

But the key to the sentence in each trial, as Judge
Baumgartner well knew, was the

racial composition of
the jury. A
substantial proportion of blacks

refuse, out of racial
loyalty, to condemn a black convicted of capital murder
to death,
the statute be damned. Thus, Baumgartner`s failure to
racially stack the Davidson jury determined the outcome,
and Davidson was sentenced to death.

Davidson`s lawyers, David Eldridge and Doug Trant, in
seeking to either get him off altogether or at least
save his neck, trod three separate paths in diversity
law.

Proceduralist scams:

Prior to and during the trial, the defense filed
numerous motions, including:

• 
  
  Arguing
  that the January 9, 2007 search of the
  
  since-demolished house
  at 2316 Chipman Street,
  where the gang-rapes and torture of the victims and
  Christian`s murder had been committed,
  
  was illegal—because
  the lead case investigator had signed the second page of
  the search warrant, but not the first—and thus that all
  evidence collected at the crime scene,
  including Channon
  Christian`s corpse, be suppressed;

• 
  
  
  Claiming that
  Davidson`s police statement should be thrown out;

• 
  
  
  
  Asking that all charges
  against Davidson be dismissed,
  following the revelation that two Knox County sheriff`s
  deputies had accidentally copied and forwarded, unread,
  to prosecutors some correspondence between Davidson and
  his attorneys; and

• 
  
  
  
  
  Asking for a mistrial
  (talk about chutzpah!) after a young female lawyer on
  the prosecution team fainted in court at the sight of a
  picture of the genital wounds inflicted by the victims`
  tormentors—which the defense had unsuccessfully sought
  to have suppressed.

(Note that many of these procedural protections, while
on paper race-neutral, were instituted from the 1960s
onward to help minority felons escape justice. Leftists
condemned the search for justice for the victims of
black predators as
“racist”, and
an exercise in

“blaming the victim”,
i.e., the racist black predator was the real
“victim”. Prior to the 1960s` explosion in black crime, some
infamous white criminals had been romanticized, but
there had never been a massive, influential movement,
found even

within criminal justice
institutions,
that sought to help heinous criminals escape
punishment.)

Judge Baumgartner rejected all of the above motions. He
wasn`t looking to get Davidson off altogether, he simply
opposed giving him proper punishment.

Bizarro World Defense:

In
Davidson`s January, 2007 police statement (summary;


video;


transcript),
amid countless, mutually contradictory revisions, he
consistently held that he had never seen Christian or
Newsom before January 7, 2007; never laid a hand on or
had sex with Christian; that Christian had not come to
the house seeking to buy “dope”; blamed the other
suspects for the kidnapping and killing; and sought to
present himself as a would-be hero who had promised
Christian that he would save her life, but who had
tragically come up short.

But Davidson`s defense team proceeded
as if his police statement had
been
thrown out—whether out of laziness, incompetence, a
desire to sow confusion among the jurors, or the hope
that the one black juror would hang the jury, the facts
be damned.

They
repeatedly implied that the victims had been in East
Knoxville to buy drugs, and that Christian had had
consensual vaginal sex with Davidson. (They suggested
that Davidson`s sperm had dripped out of Christian`s
vagina, and into her rectum.)

A
friend of Davidson`s, Ethel Lynn Freeman,

testified
that on the night of the crime, she saw them panhandling
for gas money at an East Knoxville gas station in a
notorious drug area. But there were at least three
problems with Freeman`s testimony:

• 
  It
  contradicted her previous testimony, as a prosecution
  witness, in the Eric Boyd and Letalvis Cobbins trials,
  respectively;

• 
  
  
  Based on what we know from other sources about the
  victims and about that night, it was utterly lacking in
  credibility (e.g., the victims weren`t short of money);

• 
  
  
  At
  the time of her death, Channon Christian had only a
  small amount of alcohol, and no drugs, in her system.

The defense team also
scrounged up convicted thief Jeffrey Bradley,
who now claimed to have seen Christian get out of a car
with Davidson and another woman that weekend. The
prosecution was able to show that the car was in a
different state.

The Slut Defense:

Via a new DNA test, the defense team was able to show
that

sperm from two
additional, unidentified men
was in Christian`s underwear. However, since there was
no sperm on or in her from her boyfriend, far from
suggesting that Channon Christian was

promiscuous,
the DNA test suggested that at least two additional
rapist-murderers are still at large.

Note
that defense lawyers Eldridge and Trant perpetrated
their unscrupulous smears of the characters of the
victims in court
in the presence of their grieving families.

For the sentencing phase, Eldridge and Trant switched to


the standard pity play:


“Hey, I`m depraved
on account I`m deprived”.

Davidson supposedly suffered horrific abuse as a child.
“Expert”
witnesses insisted that when Davidson was a wee lad, the
violent die was already cast.
He
was the victim, after all. (Then why prosecute him. Why
not just give him the keys to the city?)

Some
of the same weepy, pathetic relatives who had testified
in Cobbins` defense reprised their performances.

However, Davidson

had spent some of his
teen years with loving group home and foster parents,
during which time he had shown none of the violence that
the “experts”
had testified was unavoidable.

The jury was
unimpressed.

Davidson`s defense counsel will surely maintain that
they were simply giving him a vigorous defense, and that
they would be guilty of providing inadequate counsel,
had they failed to do so.

I
don`t buy that. Defense attorneys for black defendants,
whether black or white, increasingly spew nonsense
indistinguishable from that of

paranoid black
supremacists,
and even outside of court, typically talk as if their
trial antics were justified by the facts.

Lawyers, like judges, are officers of the court, sworn
to uphold the rule of law.

They
should not be indulging fantasies that they know to be
untrue, and are barred from suborning perjury.

Unfortunately,
“diversity” has

rotted
the
criminal justice system, just as it has rotted all other
American institutions.

The explosion in black violent crime—much
of it consisting in racially motivated attacks on whites—was
part and parcel of

the so-called civil
rights movement,
i.e., “diversity”, whose leaders (including


Martin Luther King Jr.)
mixed racism with communism, and taught blacks that they
were not obliged to obey America`s
“racist” laws. The elite media and academe increasingly identified
with black criminals—to the point of lying not only
about black felons` motives, but even about the extent
of the crime. They insisted, the facts be damned, that


innocent black males
were
routinely

“racially profiled”,
rounded up and imprisoned, and even murdered by racist
police. The same race-baiting
“civil rights”
ideology was behind both the

black-on-white crime
wave,
and the lies about it.

Police and prosecutors, sometimes grudgingly,

sometimes
enthusiastically, went
along.

Thus, in black-on-white

racial atrocities,
police and prosecutors have developed tortuous methods
of interrogation and courtroom questioning of suspects
and victims, attempting to get (self-incriminating)
statements adequate to achieve convictions, while at the
same time avoiding the bringing of

“hate facts”
to light.

Detectives must also interrogate each suspect, while
tiptoeing through the latter`s own minefield of lies,
contradictions, and omissions, anticipating possibly
three future minefields:

• 
  Defense attorney
  objections and motions to
  
  suppress
  the
  suspect`s police statement;

• 
  
  The search by
  
  jurors who support
  black and Hispanic felons
  for pretexts to ignore incriminating and
  self-incriminating statements, and acquit the
  defendants;

• 
  
  
  
  Similar behavior by appeals court judges.

Specifically, in the interest of political correctness,
the law enforcement authorities bar themselves from
asking suspects (and later, in court, defendants and
victims) obvious questions about motive.

For instance, in the

December 2000 Wichita
Massacre,


Sedgwick County
(Kansas) DA Nola Foulston`s cross-examination
of the two survivors of black brothers Jonathan and
Reginald Carr`s mass murder-rape-robbery spree followed
a “don`t ask,
don`t tell” policy. She asked no questions to which
answers might show that the Carrs had said politically
incorrect things to their exclusively white victims,
possibly constituting evidence of a
“hate crime”.

In
the Knoxville case, kidnapper-rapist-torturer-murderer
Letalvis Cobbins offered a Grand Canyon-wide opening to
ask such questions.

“In his statement to


[Knoxville Police Department Investigator Steve]
Still, Cobbins conceded he knew Davidson had evil on his
mind before the fatal carjacking.

“`He was already making
suggestions like he wanted to go—he never said he was
going to go and do it,` Cobbins said, though he didn`t
elaborate.”

[Carjack/slaying
trial, Day 4: `They were crazy man`: suspect defends
inaction
by Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel,
August 20, 2009.]

“Do it”?
Do
what?

Amazingly, neither investigators nor
prosecutors ever asked Cobbins what “it” was.
(See my concluding comments).

Of
course, when politically correct law enforcement
officials seek to deny the racial motivation of a
transparently racially-motivated black-on-white crime,
any old pretext—or its opposite—will do.

Thus, we have the Knox County authorities and Main
Stream Media describing

“as a carjacking
gone wrong” 
an act in which there is no evidence of any
carjacking motive (since the vehicle was almost
immediately dumped, rather than being kept or sold), or
kidnapping (since the abductors never showed any
interest in ransom).

This MO by authorities and the media
is the equivalent to their practice, when confronted
with a black stranger murdering a white without any
attempt to rob him or evidence of any other conventional
motive, of calling the crime
“a botched
robbery”. But the motive often isn`t the one for
which there is no evidence, namely robbery, but the
obvious one—racial murder.

Thus, notoriously, when California authorities were
confronted in the early 1970s, with anywhere from

70-270 black-on-white
stranger murders
in which no conventional motive played a role, they
initially employed the euphemism
“motiveless murders”, and ignored what was really happening:

the Nation of Islam`s
anti-white mass murder campaign.

Authorities later adopted secondary euphemisms, such as
“botched
robberies”.

But in the Knoxville case, rather than avoid the race
issue, as Wichita Massacre DA Foulston had done, the
authorities aggressively misrepresented the facts.


Acting as if they were
working for the various defense teams,
Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols`
office and sheriffs Sterling Owen IV and his successor,
Jimmy Jones, cited the fact that Lemaricus Davidson had
been sleeping with a white female as grounds for denying
that the crime was racially motivated.

In
variously handcuffing themselves from seeking the truth,
lying about the killers` motive, and misrepresenting the
known facts from the get-go, the Knoxville authorities
opened the door to defense attorneys to

lie with abandon.
The police and prosecutors` lie, that the Knoxville
Horror was “a carjacking gone wrong”, opened the door for the defense to
substitute its own lie. As


Jamie Satterfield reported in the October 20
Knoxville News Sentinel,
“The defense is
continuing, via cross-examination, to label the slayings
the result not of a carjacking


gone bad

but a drug deal gone
bad.”

The defense further asserted that that
it was the “the gang from Kentucky” (i.e., every
defendant except Davidson), who had raped, beaten,
tortured and murdered Christian and Newsom.

How
about we use the known facts, for a change?

The blogger

A Race Against Time
has

formulated a theory
regarding Davidson`s motive based on the recent release
of the police transcript of the January, 2007
interrogation of Lemaricus Davidson`s white former
girlfriend, Daphne Sutton. It has the virtues of both
evidence-based plausibility and simplicity:

“The

Knoxville torture
slayings
in a nutshell: Naive white girl falls for black boy.
Black boy beats white girl. White girl finally leaves
black boy. Black boy and his black friends take out
their anger by raping, torturing, and killing the first
white couple they come across….

“Sutton revealed to
police that she had only known Davidson for two weeks
when she moved in with him at 2316 Chipman Street


[the murder house]. She said she had never dated a
black man before, and her mind was clouded by drugs:

`I`ve been living with
my parents for like a year and a half, and I really
can`t stand it. You know how it is, living with your
parents. So I met him, and he was getting this house and
asked me to move in with him, and I guess just the first
person to take care of me I jumped into.

`I
don`t even date black guys, my kids are white, so I
don`t know what the hell I was thinking. I really don`t.
Maybe, I don`t know, the drugs, the weed.`

[NS: According to Cobbins, Davidson was a drug dealer.]

“Davidson regularly beat Sutton, and eventually she left
him and moved out. The very next night, Davidson and
some of his black friends carjacked a white couple that
was out on a date. Letalvis Cobbins, Davidson`s brother,
testified that Christian and Newsom `was uh kissing in
the car or whatever` when Davidson carjacked them and
drove them back to his Chipman Street home….”

“There`s no question
these crimes were racially motivated. Davidson was angry
his white girlfriend had left him, and when he saw a
young white couple kissing he snapped and decided to
take his anger out on them. The Knoxville authorities
didn`t quite see things this way.

“Astonishingly, the authorities
considered the fact Davidson`s white girlfriend had just
left him to be a


mitigating factor
in their decision not to seek hate crimes charges…

“Imagine a white male trying to claim
he can`t be charged with a hate crime because he has
socialized with black people in the past. People would
just laugh. In fact, a 14-year-old white boy in suburban
Chicago was charged with a

hate crime
last year for using a racial epithet toward his black
girlfriend after she broke up with him.

[Why
White Girls Go Black and What Happens When They Go Back,
A Race Against Time,
October 14, 2009.]

My
conclusion: Since the 1960s, America`s white elites have
repeatedly sought to make what

Peggy Noonan
has called—though without addressing the racial subtext—“a
separate peace”
for themselves with non-Asian-minority (NAM) elites. The
deal entails racially sacrificing qualified white

university
and

job applicants,
and candidates for

promotions,
on behalf of unqualified NAMs through affirmative
action; racially sacrificing whites to NAM criminals of
all ages; lying about the sacrifices; and, of course,
inventing the Orwellian category of
“hate crimes” which—as the

Wichita
and Knoxville cases
suggest, and Attorney General Holder recently

made clear—cannot
be committed against ordinary American whites.

Each time, black and Hispanic elites humor the white
elites, cut the deal, generously sacrifice more

non-elite whites—and
soon thereafter, tear up and re-negotiate the deal.

At each re-negotiation, there are more NAMs making


wilder demands,
and fewer non-elite whites to sacrifice.

Noonan quotes an anecdote from Christopher Lawford`s
book lawford Symptoms Of Withdrawal


about his uncle


Teddy Kennedy
(of all people) in his old age:

"[Kennedy]
took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought
for a moment, and changed tack. `I`m glad I`m not going
to be around when you guys are my age.` I asked him why,
and he said, `Because when you guys are my age, the
whole thing is going to fall apart.` "

“The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of
`maybe we shouldn`t go there.` Nobody wanted to touch
it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved
on."

The
time-bomb is ticking.

(I wish to thank reader
“D”, who served as my unofficial research assistant, for his
invaluable help during this trial.)

Men`s News Daily
and many other Web sites. He has also
written for Middle American News, the
New York

Daily News,
New York Post, Newsday,
Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty
and the Weekly Standard. He
maintains two blogs:
A
Different Drummer and

Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.