Feds might pursue death penalty
Two men accused of intimidating witnesses by beating a man and fatally shooting two women on the Hilltop could be at risk of the death penalty if U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions approves pursuing it.
A federal grand jury issued a 12-count indictment Tuesday that alleges that Antwan L. Hutchinson, 25, and Michael J. Favors, 24, conspired to keep Cody Campbell, 29, his mother, Sidney J. Campbell, 56, and his former girlfriend, Marie E. Stamp, 31, from talking about a West Side drugtrafficking operation.
“The drug- trafficking conspiracy was a pretty violent one,” Benjamin Glassman, U. S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said at a news conference Tuesday. The operation was based in Columbus but did business throughout Ohio, he said.
Glassman said his office will gather evidence, including any mitigating factors that the defense might offer. That information will be presented to Sessions, who has the ultimate say on whether to seek the death penalty. The process could take months, Glassman said.
The only other possible penalty for murder convictions is life in prison with no chance of parole.
According to Columbus police:
A female witness said that Cody Campbell helped Hutchinson sell drugs and that in January, he came to her house with $200 worth of crack that he and she smoked.
A couple of days later, Campbell returned with Hutchinson and told the woman that she and Campbell owed Hutchinson for the drugs. Hutchinson hit her and threatened to kill her and Campbell if they talked to police.
Hutchinson and Favors then moved into the Campbells’ Whitethorne Avenue home and started selling drugs from there, the witness said.
A few days before Campbell’s death, federal agents found a safe that Hutchinson and Campbell had installed in the witness’s house. Inside the safe were four handguns, powdered and crack cocaine, marijuana, pain pills, diamond rings valued at more than $9,000 and 400 rounds of ammunition.
The witness said that after the safe was found, Campbell told her that Hutchinson believed the two of them were cooperating with authorities.
The witness said Sidney Campbell told her she had been forced into a room at the family’s home while Hutchinson and several other people beat her son with a piece of lumber and fishing poles.
Cody Campbell’s body was found Feb. 13. Ten days later, Sidney Campbell and Stamp were found fatally shot in the same house.
The indictment says that Cody Campbell was beaten and the two women were fatally shot to prevent them from cooperating with authorities. Both women were shot in the head, according to Franklin County coroner’s office reports.
The coroner’s office ruled that Cody Campbell’s death was unintentional and caused by a cocaine and methamphetamine overdose. He also had broken ribs, internal bleeding and bruising.
The last federal death-penalty sentence in Ohio was given to Daryl Lawrence for the 2005 shooting death of Columbus police Officer Bryan Hurst during a bank robbery on the Far East Side.
The last person to be sentenced to death by a federal court was Dylann Roof for killing nine parishioners on June 17, 2015, during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Both Lawrence and Roof are in federal prisons.
The last federal inmate to be executed was Louis Jones Jr., 53, in 2003 for a murder in Texas.