Inside Charlotte courts: ‘I lost my baby.’ Family anger collides with bail reform
The hearing to determine whether first-degree murder defendant Jerome Davis would be freed before trial was still 30 minutes away when the mother of his alleged victim gave a profanity-laced preview of what she would tell the judge.
“That ------ ------ killed my daughter,” Tammi McKinley roared last month from the lobby outside the courtroom where Davis would soon appear, and where his attorney would deride the case against him as weak.
Two women struggled to pull McKinley away from Davis’s family and friends. Bailiffs rushed in to restore order.
McKinley, the mother of murder victim Khira McKinley of Charlotte, continued to shout and curse, briefly disrupting the proceedings of another case behind the closed doors of Mecklenburg Superior Court Judge Bob Bell’s courtroom.
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a policy debate over whether people accused of murder should be eligible for bail has been joined by the raw, powerful and occasionally uncensored voices of the loved ones of the dead.
Under “Marsy’s Law,” a constitutional amendment passed by North Carolina voters in 2018 that went into effect last year, families of crime victims have been given expanded and protected roles in the criminal-justice process. That includes having the right to speak before judges decide whether to release criminal defendants on bonds before trial.
The survivors’ participation has become more timely in Mecklenburg County courts. Last March the county’s judges — led in part by Bell — joined a nationwide movement to approve more bonds for criminal defendants, including those accused of murder.
Bell, a former homicide prosecutor and now the county’s senior resident Superior Court judge, says all criminal defendants — even accused killers — have the right to a fair hearing on whether they should be freed before trial.
“First-degree murder — that sounds really bad. But you know and I know that they’re not all the same,” Bell told the Observer last month.
“I believe that public safety should be a paramount concern and that there are people who should be held in custody awaiting trial. But that’s not everybody.”
‘Threat to public safety’
In December, police and prosecutors pushed back. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney aimed a critical spotlight at the judges’ bond decisions by announcing that his department would no longer offer electronic monitoring for freed murder defendants. Monitoring using electronic ankle bracelets has been a longtime condition of most of the county’s pretrial releases.
“I cannot stand behind having murder suspects on (electronic monitoring) ... I think the better place for them would be in jail awaiting trial,” Putney said.
District Attorney Spencer Merriweather agreed. While he says the county’s court system must reduce the number of defendants jailed under unnecessary bonds, Merriweather believes first-degree murder cases are “a special class.”
“We want to make sure that we have the right people in pretrial custody, not the nickel-and-dime defendants, but the people who are a threat to public safety,” Merriweather said.
“It’s an understatement to say so, but someone accused of taking someone else’s life gives me enough pause to say that this is someone the judges should be very careful about before releasing from custody,” Merriweather said.
Now, victims’ families have joined ranks with opponents of bail for accused killers, turning what were once largely routine hearings for murder defendants into highly charged courtroom dramas.
Risk vs. freedom
With Mecklenburg judges now more likely to grant bonds in murder cases, prosecutors have begun to delve more deeply into the grisly details of the crimes. Defense attorneys counter with their best arguments on why their clients deserve temporary freedom. Families offer emotional accounts of how their loved ones lived and died and why the accused should remain in custody.
Then it falls to the judge.
The county’s bail reform, according to Bell, actually is a return to the spirit of the state’s original law.
Previously — under a practice known as “charge-based” bail — bonds for murder defendants were rare. In some cases, judges refused to offer bonds at all, or they set the figure so high that critics said they were tantamount to prison sentences without convictions, with defendants having to wait two to three years behind bars for their cases to come to trial.
Under Mecklenburg’s new “risk-based” approach, judges say they base their bond decisions on two factors: whether the defendant, if freed, would be a threat to public safety or a threat to flee.
Bell says he also takes into account the strength of the prosecution’s case, the filings and oral arguments from both sides, the defendant’s criminal record and level of community support, as well as what the victims’ families have to say.
He said much of the opposition to bail for violent offenders is the concern they will strike again. “That’s always the fear, and it has happened before,” he said.
Last month, Merriweather called for the legislature to replace the state’s bond laws with the federal model, which doesn’t use cash bonds and where judges base custody decisions solely on whether defendants pose a threat to public safety.
Prominent Charlotte defense attorney Tony Scheer, a former Mecklenburg prosecutor, says the new bond policy continues more than a decade of courtroom reforms that has made the county’s criminal-justice system among the most progressive in the country.
The alternative, he said, “is to keep the jail filled with people accused but not convicted of a crime and let them rot until we can get them a trial.”
Scheer also is a critic of the police decision to drop electronic monitoring for homicide defendants, recently describing it in court as an attempted CMPD “veto” of due process, including the presumption of innocence.
If police hoped their decision would end the pretrial release of accused killers, it hasn’t worked. While most first-degree murder defendants remain in custody, at least three have been given bonds since Putney’s announcement.
Combined with statistics released before the policy change, that means just under three dozen Charlotte-Mecklenburg murder defendants are currently free while they await trial.
An Ikea carving knife
Nonetheless, the absence of electronic monitoring has further complicated bond decisions.
Bell said he factors in the lack of police surveillance in first-degree murder cases whenever he considers bail.
During a December bond hearing, prosecutor Heidi Perlman told a judge that CMPD’s new policy had removed the last line of defense between the public and Bailey Todd, a 22-year-old accused killer from Matthews.
Todd is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the June slashing death of her former longtime boyfriend, Josh Griffin. Todd’s boyfriend at the time of the killing, Sean Harper, also is charged with murder, court records show.
In opposing Todd’s bond request, Perlman took a deep dive into the details of Griffin’s death: How tensions between Todd, Griffin and Harper had simmered throughout the day before they binged together after midnight in Harper’s car on cocaine and Bombay gin.
Eventually, according to the prosecutor, Harper attacked Griffin, who fled for his life into nearby woods before being slashed to death with a 12-inch Ikea carving knife.
After the prosecutor finished, Griffin’s family members had their say.
His mother told Superior Court Judge Robert Ervin that Todd was capable of unpredictable violence. His grandfather described Todd as a “sociopath who has no conscience,” and asked Ervin “not to turn her loose on society until this thing is over.”
Scheer told the judge that Todd and Griffin had a long and volatile relationship, and that at the time of his death, Griffin was under a restraining order that banned him from seeing her. According to jail records, Griffin also faced an array of pending charges — from assault on a female and communicating threats to discharging a firearm in an enclosed area to incite fear. All involved Todd.
According to Scheer, Todd had expected a fight between her former and current boyfriend — not a killing. He said she was not a flight risk nor a threat to commit more crimes.
In the end, Ervin lowered Todd’s bond to $300,000. Jail records indicate she was released on Jan. 10. Her trial has not been scheduled.
Todd’s pre-trial release began the day after Tammi McKinley made her case on why another accused killer should stay in jail.
She told the judge, “I lost my baby.”
‘He killed my baby girl’
On July 4, Khira McKinley’s body had been found in the front seat of her Toyota Corolla. Prosecutor Glenn Cole said the bullet that killed her was fired from such close range that the muzzle flash had burned the skin under the 23-year-old’s left breast.
Davis was arrested a month later in Spartanburg — proving that he is a flight risk, Cole said. At the time of his bail hearing, he’d been jailed without bond for nearly five months.
Tammi McKinley had composed herself by the time Cole signaled her to come to the front of the courtroom. She spoke in a low monotone to ask Bell to keep Davis in custody.
“He killed my baby girl. He took my daughter. I just don’t think he should be out,” she said with Davis standing a few feet away. “No decent person would treat a girl like that. He’s not a man ... That’s all I have to say.”
Defense attorney Norman Butler told Bell that the prosecution had no eye witnesses linking Davis to Khira McKinley’s shooting. Reports of Davis’ previous assaults of his girlfriend were based on hearsay, he said, leaving the state with a case so flimsy that it almost required his client to be released from jail.
Butler asked for “a reasonable bond.”
Bell, without comment, refused to give it. Davis was led out of the courtroom and taken back to his cell.
