After death sentence and 43 years in prison, Columbus man will get new trial in murder case
More than four decades after an all-white jury convicted a black defendant of raping and killing a soldier’s wife in downtown Columbus, the Georgia Supreme Court has overturned his conviction and granted him a new trial.
The court’s decision in the case of Johnny Lee Gates comes after decades of appeals during which defense attorneys argued prosecutors here in the 1970s systematically struck prospective black jurors to ensure all-white juries in death penalty cases.
But those allegations were not the basis for the court’s decision on Gates. The justices determined that because DNA tests on evidence from the homicide did not match Gates, the outcome of his trial could have been different, had such tests been available at the time.
The ruling upholds Senior Muscogee Superior Court Judge John Allen’s Jan. 10, 2019 decision to grant Gates a new trial, which prosecutors appealed to the high court.
Gates was convicted and sentenced to death in the Nov. 30, 1976, rape and murder of Katharina Wright, 19, found bound and shot in the head in the Broadway apartment she shared with her husband, a Fort Benning soldier the German woman had just married.
Wright’s murder remained a mystery until January 1977 when Gates, then 21, was arrested with two other men while trying to rob a store. A tipster told police he had loaned Gates a .32-caliber handgun that Gates used to shoot Wright in the head, but when police later found the gun, ballistics tests proved it was not the murder weapon.
So prosecutors based the case against Gates primarily on his confession, which defense attorneys claimed was fed to him by police.
Confession
Gates said he went to Wright’s home disguised as a gas company worker, and Wright let him in, saying she had called the utility about a faulty heater.
She gave him a can of oil and showed him the heater, on which he pretended to work before pulling a gun and telling her he was robbing her. She told him she had no money, but could offer him sex, which he claimed was consensual.
He also claimed he found a few hundred dollars while searching the apartment, and then he tied Wright up and started to leave when she said she could identify him, so he shot her.
Besides the confession, the state presented evidence Gates’ fingerprints were found on Wright’s heater, after his arrest in 1977. The defense claims Gates left his prints when police escorted him through the apartment during his videotaped confession.
Gates was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in three days.
Later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing the mentally disabled was unconstitutional, and an appeals court in 1992 decided Gates was entitled to a trial to determine whether he had an intellectual disability.
After that trial in 2003 ended in a mistrial, the defense and prosecution agreed then to change Gates’ sentence from death to life in prison.
The Georgia Innocence Project joined in Gates’ defense in 2015, later joined by the Southern Center for Human Rights.
The forensic evidence from Wright’s murder was thought to have been destroyed in 1979, but two interns with the Innocence Project digging through boxes of files in 2015 found an envelope containing Wright’s velour bathrobe belt and her husband’s black military ties. Those were used to bind her in her home at what in 1976 were the Fountain Court Apartments on Broadway, which since have been demolished.
Gates’ DNA was not on the belt or the ties, though presumably he would have had to grip them tight to tie the knots, leaving some of his skin cells.
Though those DNA tests proved crucial in Gates’ defense, his attorneys also blasted prosecutors here for discriminatory jury selection.
Race issues
In Allen’s 2019 decision granting Gates a new trial, the judge declared that prosecutors in the 1970s regularly struck black jurors in death-penalty cases involving black defendants to ensure they got an all-white jury.
“The prosecutors clearly engaged in systematic exclusion of blacks during jury selection in this case,” Allen wrote. “They identified the black prospective jurors by race in their jury selection notes, singled them out for pre-emptory strikes, and struck them to try Gates before an all-white jury.”
But the defense brought that up too late, as under court standards for new trial arguments, any issue the defense already knew or should have known about, and failed to argue earlier, can’t be raised at the last minute, Allen wrote.
The Supreme Court’s decision neither clears Gates’ name nor sets him free. Still charged with Wright’s murder, he remains held in the Macon State Prison near Oglethorpe. He is 63 years old.
Now his case will be returned to Muscogee Superior Court for another trial, said District Attorney Julia Slater.
“We do plan to continue to prosecute him,” Slater said.