Feds refuse plea in postal worker slaying
Government seeks death penalty, won’t settle for life in prison
The Justice Department rejected a plea offer and will continue to pursue the death penalty against a San Jacinto County man accused of killing a postal worker and burning her body, a prosecutor told a federal judge Wednesday in Houston.
This was welcome news for the 52-year-old victim’s husband and two adult sons who are both mail carriers.
In the five years since Eddie “Marie” Youngblood’s death, suspect James Wayne Ham has repeatedly offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions has no plans to back down from the determination made by his predecessors under President Barack Obama, the prosecutor said.
The Houston procedural hearing on the 2013 case came after Trump and Sessions indicated this week they planned to seek the federal death penalty against the suspect in a mass shooting inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday.
Ham, 43, wearing a dark green jail jumpsuit, sat silently at the defense table during the two-hour hearing in a case the government contends was motivated by his belief the post worker was delivering his mail to his estranged wife.
Taking snipes at Justice officials for their sluggish pace and lack of preparation, U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes questioned Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharad S. Khandelwal about the utility of spending time and money to seek the death penalty when Ham would spend the rest of his life behind bars as a result of a guilty plea.
“To the United States this is not a question of money but of justice,” Khandelwal said. The prosecutor explained that the government believes Ham has no remorse for his actions, based on intercepted calls from the facility where Ham is being detained in which he apparently boasted about killing Youngblood.
“It’s not your money; it’s everybody else’s money,” the judge said. “Either way he’s incapacitated. He’ll either be dead or in prison.” ‘Changed my life’
But Youngblood’s surviving husband, sons and daughter-inlaw, who sat in the first row seats in Hughes’ courtroom, said they hoped Ham will be convicted and sentenced to death.
Mark Youngblood, 33, and his brother George Youngblood Jr., 36, both are postal workers and share a deep love for their mother. Seeing Ham for the first time in court Wednesday, Mark said, gave him chills because he had been talking on the phone with his mother at the time she was killed.
“It completely changed my life,” he said softly. “I want justice.”
The government previously noted as part of its rationale for the death penalty that Ham specifically presented a danger to Youngblood’s sons in the postal service.
Typically, when a prosecutor turns down a plea offer it’s because they believe a crime is so serious, no other disposition is appropriate, said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. He said people think the federal death penalty comes into play only when a defendant is accused of multiple slayings, like the Dylann Roof prosecution for the Charleston church killings or Timothy McVeigh’s trial for the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Most people are under the impression that the federal death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst crimes against the United States, but the fact is for the most part people who are sentenced to death under the capital system look no different from the people who you would see prosecuted by the state,” Dunham said.
He said a disproportionate number of federal death sentences come from courts in Texas, Missouri and Virginia and defendants are disproportionately people of color. This case is atypical, he said, in that Ham is white and his victim was black. Previous charges
Youngblood was killed while working her rural postal route in Coldspring, about 60 miles north of Houston. Ham is charged with murdering a federal employee and possessing a weapon in a crime resulting in death. He allegedly fired at least two gunshots at Youngblood and set fire to her Jeep Cherokee — and his own clothes to conceal evidence of the crime.
Ham thought Youngblood was in cahoots with his estranged wife, another rural mail carrier, according to court documents. He thought Youngblood intended to reroute his mail to his ex-wife’s home.
The government has contended in court filings that Ham was eligible for the death penalty because he was previously charged with raping a female relative and sexually assaulting a woman he met at a bar. He had threatened to kill his wife, shot and killed his estranged wife’s goats, fired at a pair of dogs that belonged to another family and stole guns, prosecutors said. He also had “a propensity to set things on fire when he feels he has been wronged,” they noted. Ham had set puppies on fire, started a blaze in a national forest and lit up a mobile home, according to the documents.
The case was prosecuted in federal court because Youngblood was a federal employee. However, federal prosecutors rarely seek the death penalty, and in Southeast Texas it has been sought in only a handful of cases.
In all 13 people have been sentenced to death by Texas federal courts. In the past quarter century, three other defendants have been sentenced to death in federal courts in Southeast Texas.
Drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza was condemned to death in 1993 for killing three drug traffickers in Brownsville and was executed in 2001. Alfred Bourgeois remains on death row after a Corpus Christi jury returned a 2004 capital conviction against him in the shaking death of his 2-year-old daughter. Tyrone Williams, a truck driver, was given a death sentence after his conviction in a 2003 smuggling attempt that left 19 undocumented immigrants dead in a tractor trailer near Victoria. Williams was retried in 2007 and sentenced to life.
Ham’s current defense lawyers, who have had the case only since June, told the judge Wednesday they needed two years to prepare for trial. The government asked for the trial to be held in February. Hughes said he would review the trial plans and aim to make a determination later this month.