Hundreds of callers who helped find the men charged with killing former Student Body President Eve Carson will stay anonymous, a judge ordered Thursday.
The Orange County district attorney has documents which detail the tipster calls, some of which have already been provided to the defense lawyers of the men charged with Carson’s killing.
After today’s order, the district attorney will hand over only the transcripts that don’t identify the tipsters, and all of the tips will remain sealed from public view.
Most of the calls were to the anonymous tip service Crime Stoppers, Inc. The government wanted to ensure that the promise of anonymity was kept so that people would continue to use the service, which solves otherwise unsolvable crimes, District Attorney Jim Woodall said.
The defense attorneys wanted to see all of the tips to ensure that there weren’t other people that could have been arrested for the crime.
The tips were only a fraction of the evidence which led to the arrest of Lawrence Alvin Lovette, 19, and Demario James Atwater, 23, in March 2008, Woodall has said.
Both men were charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping of Carson that month.
Preparing for federal trial
Atwater is also being prosecuted in federal court.
Because its so rare for federal courts to pursue cases similar to his, defense attorneys are arguing that the decision to indict him and choose to pursue the death penalty was arbitrary and based on race.
Motions filed Monday asked for courts to rule out the possibility of the death penalty.
They wrote that the U.S. attorney general was nearly four times more likely to authorize the death penalty in cases where the defendant was a young black male and the victim was a young white female than in other cases between 2001 and 2008.
Atwater’s case is only the second charged in the Middle District of North Carolina between 1998 and 2008 on an indictment in which death was a possible penalty, even though a firearm was used in 1,098 murders, the defense wrote.
The statistics are enough to prove discrimination, defense lawyers wrote.
Lovette was less than 18 years old at the time of the crime and was ineligible to receive the death penalty. He was not indicted by federal prosecutors.
“Apart from their death penalty eligibility, there is no other distinguishable, legitimate reason why the government would not prosecute Mr. Lovette federally for Ms. Carson’s murder, considering that Mr. Lovette and (Atwater) were allegedly involved in the exact same crime,” a defense motion states.
If federal prosecutors want to respond to the defense’s claim before the trial, they have to do so by March 15, said Lynne Klauer, spokeswoman for the Middle District. The trial is scheduled to begin in May.
Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.
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Friday, May 17, 2024
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