Charlotte light rail stabbing suspect assigned new death penalty lawyer
A new lawyer who specializes in death penalty cases with competency concerns will represent the suspect accused of stabbing and killing Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail in late August.
DeCarlos Brown Jr., 35, who faces one state murder charge in Zarutska’s killing, also faces a federal charge of killing on a mass transportation system. If convicted, a judge could sentence him to life in prison or death. President Donald Trump has called for the death penalty in his case.
Federal law requires that defendants facing charges punishable by death be allowed at least one attorney who is “sufficiently experienced” in representing capital offenders, according to a judge’s order issued last week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.
Capital cases like Brown’s are governed by a unique body of law. Asking a lawyer who doesn’t hold those skills to work those cases would be “an absolute, predictable disaster,” said Robin Maher, who helped craft the American Bar Association’s guidelines on capital cases in 2003 and is now the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Quality of counsel, Maher said, “makes all the difference between a life and death sentence.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Rodriguez, who Trump recently nominated to become a district judge, appointed an experienced capital defense lawyer, Joshua Kendrick of Greenville, South Carolina, to represent Brown alongside federal public defenders Mary Ellen Coleman and Megan Hoffman.
Kendrick most recently represented death row inmate Steven Bixby, who has been convicted of shooting officers dead in 2003. At a recent competency hearing, Kendrick and Bixby’s other lawyers argued he is unable to rationally communicate with them and therefore should not be executed, The State reported. Bixby thought that laws passed after the Constitution’s Bill of Rights were invalid and that citizens have the right to defend their property to the death.
A federal judge in South Carolina did not agree that those beliefs made him mentally incompetent and ordered that his execution move forward.
A Mecklenburg judge has ordered Brown be mentally evaluated before his cases move forward on the Mecklenburg Superior Court charge. Along with the state murder charge, he also faces a misdemeanor misusing 911 charge from January, before the train stabbing.
A judge is expected to order a similar mental evaluation in his federal case. Brown remains in Mecklenburg jail custody.
Kendrick has worked on several highly-publicized capital cases. They include:
- Hassan Lawal, a Nigerian man arraigned in the sexual extortion and suicide of 17-year-old Gavin Guffey. Guffey is the son of a York County, S.C., state legislator.
- Daqua Ritter, a South Carolina man convicted of the hate-crime murder of transgender Black woman Dime Doe. Ritter’s was the first trial under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act — a landmark federal statute passed in 2009 which allows federal criminal prosecution of hate crimes motivated by the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.
- Trevor Seward, a South Carolina man convicted of killing a U.S. Postal Service employee by shooting 20 rounds from his AR-15 into her vehicle. The death penalty was deauthorized in Seward’s case.
