Columbus murder suspect granted new trial could walk free after 43 years in prison
After 43 years in prison for a Columbus murder he says he did not commit, Johnny Lee Gates at age 63 nearly walked free Monday from the Muscogee County Jail, because prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed he could be released on his own recognizance.
But the judge did not agree, saying he could not allow someone convicted of murder to walk out of jail with only the promise that he would not flee, before the case was resolved.
Gates’ 1977 conviction for raping, robbing and killing a 19-year-old woman in her Broadway apartment was overturned March 13 by the Georgia Supreme Court, which decided 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.
That ruling upheld Senior Muscogee Superior Court Judge John Allen’s Jan. 10, 2019 decision to grant Gates a new trial, which prosecutors had appealed to the high court.
The Supreme Court’s ruling did not dismiss the murder case; it only allowed Gates to be tried again, so the charges still are pending.
But prosecutors revealed Monday that they have offered to negotiate a plea that would close the case and allow Gates to go free: His murder charge would be reduced to voluntary manslaughter; his armed robbery charge would remain; and his rape charge would be dismissed.
Gates would be sentenced to 20 years for manslaughter and 20 more for armed robbery, and he would be freed with credit for the time he already has spent in prison.
Gates was willing to accept that offer, but maintains he is innocent. Judge Bobby Peters said he won’t accept the guilty pleas if Gates does not admit he committed the crimes.
Gates was represented Monday by Patrick Mulvaney of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who repeatedly tried to persuade Peters either to accept the OR bond to which prosecutors had consented, or to set some nominal cash bond Gates might be able to pay, though he remains indigent after decades in prison.
Noting Gates’ age, Mulvaney said the defendant is being housed in the general jail population, where his defense team fears he is at risk of catching the COVID-19 virus, considered a more serious health threat to older patients.
Assistant District Attorney Fred Lewis said prosecutors agreed to Gates’ release, because they believe Gates is unlikely to commit new crimes or to flee. As he awaited a new trial, the district attorney’s staff would review the case to determine whether witnesses and evidence in the case still were available.
So far attorneys from each side have been discussing a plea, Lewis said.
Mulvaney said Gates will admit no guilt: “Mr. Gates is not willing to do that, to admit guilt to this charge. Mr. Gates is innocent of this charge and maintains his innocence on this charge.”
Peters replied that if Gates pleads guilty while claiming he didn’t commit the crime, “then that’s not justice for anybody. We want justice for the victim and justice for Mr. Gates, and usually a trial, it appears, is the best way to get to that point.”
Peters noted Gates had a previous murder charge that was resolved in a voluntary manslaughter plea. Lewis acknowledged that, saying Gates had served his time in that case. The court did not delve into any details related to that previous offense.
Peters ended Monday’s hearing by telling attorneys he would consider setting a bond for Gates, and then confer with them in the next few days.
The murder
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.
During Monday’s court session, which was a video conference live-streamed on YouTube to meet social-distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 crisis, Lewis told Peters prosecutors have been in contact with the widower, and he has agreed to the plea deal they offered Gates.
Gates was 21 when he was arrested in January 1977 with two other men 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.
Under police questioning, Gates confessed to the murder, though defense attorneys later claimed detectives directed him to give that confession, taking advantage of Gates’ naivete.
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 said he found a few hundred dollars while searching the apartment, and then tied Wright up and started to leave. That’s 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. The defense claimed Gates left his prints there in 1977, when police escorted him through the apartment during his videotaped confession.
Gates was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in three days.
The appeals
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 ended in a mistrial in 2003, the defense and prosecution agreed to change Gates’ sentence from death to life in prison.
The Georgia Innocence Project came to 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’ appeal, his attorneys argued also that he deserved a new trial because of the discriminatory jury selection procedures prosecutors practiced here.
In Allen’s 2019 decision, the judge declared 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 ruled.
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 3:15 PM.