Underwoods

Judge Defies Victim’s Family by Sending DUI Driver to Prison

Apr 212013
 

iStockPhoto/Thinkstock(FRESNO, Calif.) — The judge who sentenced a Fresno, Calif., man to jail for his role in a deadly drunk driving accident, defied the wishes of the victim’s family who had asked that the driver not receive jail time.

Judge Alan Simpson sentenced 25-year-old Brian Cappelluti to a year in jail after Cappelluti pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and DUI charges on Thursday.

In 2011, Cappelluti was arrested after driving drunk with a blood alcohol level of .21 and crashing into a traffic light. The accident took the life of passenger 23-year-old J.W. Pardini, a close friend of Cappelluti’s.

Before Cappelluti’s sentencing, the Pardini family wrote a letter to the judge asking that Cappelluti not be given jail time.

“JW is gone forever. Brian has to live with the thought of this accident every day for the rest of his life,” the family wrote in a statement. “We suggest that probation for Brian is the proper corrective action.”

Another passenger in the car, Marion Walker, was severely injured during the crash. But she also spoke out for Cappelluti and asked the judge for leniency in his sentencing.

“All of us will pay for this accident for the rest of our lives,” Walker said. “We all understood what could happen and it did. I ask you not to take away my surviving support.”

While Simpson’s sentence of one year in jail is more than the defense wanted, it is far less than the five years in prison the prosecutors had asked for.

“I think the outcome was fair and just and everybody can feel that justice was done,” defense attorney Rick Berman told ABC News affiliate KFSN-TV in Fresno after the sentencing.

An earlier plea bargain fell apart in February after Cappelluti refused a deal that could have resulted in his spending six years in prison. During that hearing, Judge Houry Sanderson chided Cappelluti for relying on the kindness of Pardini’s family.

“If he was not related at all to these victims at all, total strangers, I am very sure that the position of these families would have been very different,” Sanderson said.

Cappelluti could be released from jail after eight months.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

David Ranta Has Heart Attack After Leaving Prison Exonerated

Mar 242013
 

(NEW YORK) — David Ranta has suffered a massive heart attack just two days after being exonerated of murder and leaving prison for the first time in 23 years, his attorney told ABCNews.com.

Lawyer Pierre Sussman said that Ranta, 58, was being treated in a New York hospital after suffering a severe heart attack Friday night. He did not provide further details.

Ranta was freed from prison Thursday after serving 23 years of a 37.5 year sentence for the murder of Brooklyn rabbi Chaskel Werzberger in 1990.

Ranta left a Brooklyn courtroom Thursday after a judge said he was free to go and his family cheered. On the way out he told reporters that the sensation of walking freely out of the courthouse was “overwhelming.”

“I said from the beginning,” Ranta said. “I had nothing to do with this case.” When asked what he was going to do next, he responded, “Get the hell out of here.”

Ranta had been spending time with his family after his release. Sussman declined to provide details or to identify the hospital to protect Ranta’s privacy.

The rabbi was killed after a botched jewelry heist and Ranta was convicted of the killing despite his protests of innocence.

Over the last two decades the case against Ranta began to crumble. In 2011 an eyewitness, who was a child at the time of the murder, came forward to say he had been coached to pick Ranta out of a line up. A subsequent investigation by the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office determined Ranta’s case had been mishandled by police.

On Thursday Ranta’s family, including siblings and his pregnant daughter who was just 2 when he was arrested, were on hand when Judge Miriam Cyrulnik cleared his name. Ranta’s parents died while he was in prison.

“It’s clear that the effects of this case have been devastating,” Cyrulnik said. “To say I’m sorry for what you have endured would be an understatement.”

Prosecutors say they now suspect the murderer is a man who died two months after Werzberger was killed. They did not name him.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

Washington Man Sentenced to 2 Years in Prison For Killing Terminally Ill Wife

Feb 032013
 

Photodisc/Digital Vision/Thinkstock(SEATTLE, Wash.) — A Washington man was sentenced to two years in prison for shooting his terminally ill wife in what his family said was a mercy killing.

Donald McNeely, 55, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Thursday. His adult children asked a judge for mercy and insisted their father killed their mother, who had an inoperable brain tumor, out of compassion.

“I think that was his only option,” said Nikki Bryant, McNeely’s daughter.

“He loved my mother,” she told ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle. “He still loves her very, very much.”

On March 14, 2012, McNeely sat with his wife, Linda, who had just returned from hospice care. He watched her for two hours as she slept before he delivered one shot to her ailing body.

McNeely called 911 around 3 p.m. that day and told the operator he “could not stand it anymore,” according to the police report.

He then called his two adult children, who rushed to the scene as he surrendered to police.

The body of 52-year-old Linda McNeely was found draped with a blanket in the home, with a pistol lying nearby, according to the report.

McNeely told police his wife had asked him several times over the course of her illness to shoot her.

Washington is one of two states that has a “Death With Dignity” Act. The law allows terminally ill adults who are of sound mind and have been given six months or less to live the right to obtain prescription drugs that will speed up their deaths. Oregon is the only other state with a similar law.

The McNeelys had considered the option, but Linda McNeely was not a candidate because of her cognitive deterioration, the Everett Herald reported.

Donald McNeely had faced a maximum of 18 years in prison.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

Chicago Prison Escape: Second of Two Bank Robbers Arrested

Jan 042013
 

Kevin Horan/Stone(CHICAGO) — A convicted bank robber who escaped jail before Christmas is back in custody.  

Kenneth Conley, 38, one of two inmates who escaped from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago on Dec. 18, was taken into custody at an apartment complex in the suburb of Palos Hills Friday evening.  The other man, Joseph “Jose” Banks, 37, was captured just two days after the escape.  

Banks and Conley were last seen Dec. 17 at 10 p.m. during a prison head count at the correctional center in downtown Chicago’s Loop district.  The two borrowed a move from the film Escape From Alcatraz by stuffing their beds with clothes in the shape of bodies.

The men then broke the window of their cell at the federal prison, shimmying out a hole only inches wide, and scaled 17 stories down the side of the building, all the while holding onto a rope of sheets and towels taken from the prison.  The rope was strong enough to support the two, one weighing 165 pounds the other 185 pounds.

At 7 a.m. the next morning, as employees arrived at work, they noticed the sheets left dangling from the building and discovered that Conley and Banks were missing.

Investigators said surveillance cameras captured Banks and Conley getting into a taxi minutes after their brazen escape.  They entered the taxi at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, just blocks away from the jail.

The men then showed up at the home of Sandy Conley, Kenneth Conley’s mother, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Ill., on Tuesday morning, only five hours after they escaped.

“He was in the house for two minutes,” Sandy Conley told ABC News on Thursday.  “I can’t tell you if he was armed.  I made him get out.”

It is unclear what connection, if any, Conley might have to the Palos Hills apartment complex where he was apprehended.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

Ex-Marine Jon Hammar Freed From Mexico Prison

Dec 222012
 

WPLG/ABC News(NEW YORK) — A former U.S. Marine has been released from a Mexico jail after being locked up for five months on gun charges.

Officials from the U.S. Consulate General in Matamoros, Mexico met Jon Hammar at the prison Friday and escorted him to the U.S. border, where he was reunited with his family in time for the holidays, said Patrick Ventrell, acting deputy spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.

The nightmare unfolded in August, when Hammar and fellow veteran Ian McDonough departed for what was supposed to be a few months of surfing and camping in a Winnebago in Costa Rica.

The two had recently finished a treatment program for post-traumatic stress disorder, which Hammar suffered after fighting in Fallujah, Afghanistan, according to his mother, Olivia Hammar.

“The treatment’s very exhausting, it’s a tough program, and he was there almost nine months,” said Olivia Hammar. “(They) decided they were going to buy an R.V., fix it up, drive down to Costa Rica through Mexico, and we were very nervous about it. We tried to discourage it, to tell him to take a plane, but they said, ‘We’re taking nine surfboards and need a place to stay.’”

Hammar and McDonough arrived on the border between Mexico and Texas on Aug. 15. Hammar, however, had packed his great grandfather’s shotgun, a .410 Sears and Roebuck model nearly 100 years old. Hammar had hoped to hunt small birds with it while living in Costa Rica, Olivia said. The pair wanted to register the gun with Mexican authorities at the crossing point.

“There were signs that said you can’t take a firearm, and so Ian said scrap it, don’t take it, but Johnny said, ‘Let’s talk to the customs agent,’” according to Olivia. “They said, ‘Technically you can (bring it across) but you’ll need to register it,’ and had (Johnny) fill out paperwork to present to Mexican officials.”

The gun was meant for hunting, but border officials arrested the pair on federal charges of having a weapon that is reserved for military use. McDonough was released when Hammar claimed the gun was his.

Olivia and Jon Hammar, Sr., hired local lawyers to defend their son in Matamoros, Mexico, where Hammar was taken to state prison. The U.S. State Department was notified by Mexican authorities the following day, according to a department official who spoke on background.

“Almost immediately we began receiving extortion calls from cartel members in prison with him,” Olivia said. The State Department and Hammar’s lawyer, Eddie Varon Levy, would not comment on the claim about cartel members.

“They’re saying, ‘You need to wire us money or we’re going to kill your son, we’ve already f—ed him up,’ and initially I thought it was a scam, but then they put him on the phone and he was breathless and I knew they had,” Olivia said. “He said, ‘You need to do whatever they say. I’m so sorry. I’ll pay you back.’” Hammar had been a lifelong surfer and sailor who loved being outdoors. He enlisted in the Marines at age 18, in 2003, to challenge himself. When he returned from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2007, after his unit lost 16 soldiers, he was “a different man,” she said.

Hammar’s release was celebrated by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who was one of his most vocial supporters.

“I am overcome with joy knowing that Jon will be spending Christmas with his parents, family and friends,” she said.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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