“Her behavior out there indicates that she has no regard for human life”
Judge Richard Baumgartner, referring to convict Vanessa Coleman
Friday a week ago, Knox County Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner resisted defense attorney appeals that argued that Vanessa Coleman, 18 at the time of the 2007 Knoxville Horror murders, was “young and unable to fend for herself,” and should be classified as a “mitigated offender,” and receive a sentence of no more than 14 years in prison. She will be eligible for parole in 16 years.
The remorseless Coleman, who never sought even to feign regret, had been convicted on May 13 of “facilitating” the rapes and murder of Christian, but acquitted of the actual rapes and murder. Coleman’s defense counselors, Theodore Lavit and Russell Green (who were assisted by three younger attorneys), portrayed her as having been as much a victim as Channon Christian. (According to my reader-researcher David in Tennessee, who attended three days of the trial, as well as the sentencing, this despicable tactic actually scored with some white female jurors.)
(I had booked airline tickets and a room, in order to be present for Coleman’s sentencing, but USAirways canceled my flight out of JFK, due to thunder showers that were predicted at some point on the itinerary.)
The Crime the MSM Have “Disappeared”
“The Knoxville Horror” is the name I coined for the atrocity that was committed between January 6 and 8, 2007, by a group of at least six blacks against the white couple, Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Lemaricus Davidson, then 25, his half-brother, Letavis Cobbins, 24, George Thomas, 24, and possibly as many as three other men carjacked and kidnapped Christian and Newsom at the Washington Pike apartments.
Authorities long believed that the carjacking and kidnapping were carried out after midnight on Sunday, January 7, 2007, because Channon Christian had called her father, Gary, after midnight, to calmly tell him that she was o.k. However, they eventually concluded that the couple had been carjacked and kidnapped at approximately 10:30 p.m., on Saturday, January 6, and thus that the gang had forced Channon Christian to make the call, and she was putting on a brave face for her father.
The kidnappers blindfolded their victims and took them to the house at 2316 Chipman Street that Davidson was renting, and where Coleman was waiting. There, Davidson and Cobbins and two other, still unidentified men raped Christian repeatedly in her mouth, vagina, and anus, until her lower lip was ripped from her gums. The men and/or Coleman savaged her private parts, repeatedly shoving a jagged object into, and/or kicking her vagina, hour after hour after hour. Some observers believe that Coleman engaged in the sexual torture out of sexual jealousy, because her boyfriend, Cobbins, found “the white girl” more attractive than her (which was undoubtedly and understandably the case).
The medical examiner found semen from Davidson, Cobbins, and two unidentified men on Channon Christian’s panties, in her vagina, and in her anus, but none from her boyfriend. That means that two rapist-murderers are still at large, and that Channon and Christopher had not yet made love.
(An unidentified member or members of the gang also raped the bound Christopher Newsom with a blunt instrument, savaging Newsom’s anus.)
What is not a matter of conjecture is that Coleman’s DNA was found on the strips of fabric used to bind Channon Christian.
What is also not a matter of conjecture is that, far from being a prisoner, or feeling any remorse for what she had done, days after the murders, a thrilled Vanessa Coleman wrote in her journal (as David reported on May 8):
Here is an account from the Knoxville ABC station, “I’ve had one hell of an adventure in the big TN,” and “Ha Ha.”
[NS: Coleman’s “adventure in the big TN” consisted, in its entirety, of her participation in the gang rape, torture, and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. So much for the disgusting contention by Coleman, her attorneys, and her family that she was a prisoner, and as much a victim as Channon Christian.]
We in the courtroom audience felt it blew apart the defense that Theodore Lavit had put up through cross examination the last two days. Lavit made only a brief cross on the journal even though he knew of it for months. He looked beaten to me, though I suppose he’ll think of something over the weekend. The jury, which by previous questions, seems to have some pro-defense jurors, asked no questions, perhaps out of shock. Being there in person, I could see the jury. I’ve read that most juries are half of what each side wants. This jury certainly looked half and half to me.
What is not a matter of conjecture is that in her January 31, 2007 police interrogation Coleman admitted that she was at the crime scene, while Channon Christian was being raped, beaten, tortured and murdered, and spoke of cooking her crime partners a hearty breakfast, after they had spent all night savaging the victims and murdering Christopher Newsom. According to Coleman’s own statement, she never looked in on Christian that morning, gave her anything to eat, tended to her wounds, or even gave her a thought. (Audio, Part I; audio, Part II; audio, Part III; transcript; read the transcript, the audiotapes are interminable, and of poor quality.)
Coleman also made all manner of unbelievable statements, such as denying that she could hear Channon Christian screaming in pain, even though she was just a few feet away from the doorless room in which Christian, who was not gagged, was being raped, beaten, and tortured with blunt objects, fists, feet, and cleaning fluid, and one or more of her killers caused “blunt force trauma” to her genital area, either through hitting her there with a blunt object or kicking her there. She also denied ever having seen Newsom.
As I recounted in May, 2008, Christian’s assailants unsuccessfully sought to eliminate all DNA evidence from her body. Although they had already decided to kill her, rather than wait until she was dead, to further torture her they washed her vagina, rectum, and mouth with an astringent cleaning solution while she was alive.
Christian had been beaten with enough force to cause bruising on her brain, but the worst injuries, [Medical Examiner Dr. Darinka] Mileusnic-Polchan said, were sustained in what she described as a savage sexual assault.
"It's much more than a simple sexual trauma," she testified. "It's extreme."
She said Christian was not only repeatedly raped both orally, vaginally and rectally, but that it appears an object was used in the attack.
Christian had extensive injuries in the genital region and her mouth, including the tearing of the membrane that connected Christian's lips to her gums.
She said Christian suffocated because she was placed into a forced fetal position inside the trash can as well as because of a plastic garbage bag that had been pulled tightly over her face.
"It was a slow asphyxia death," she said. "My conclusion was she actually died in the trash can."
[“Jury wants to go home; deliberations in Boyd case to begin in a.m” by Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel, April 15, 2008]
(The damage to Christian’s gums was almost certainly caused by Cobbins, who repeatedly raped her orally, yet who at trial insisted that Christian had “offered” him sex, and that he had been as much a victim as her. You see a pattern here?)
Christian ultimately asphyxiated when Lemaricus Davidson shoved the hogtied woman face first, her head covered with garbage bags, into a tight plastic garbage can. Coleman, Cobbins, and Thomas were all present at the time.
Judge Richard Baumgartner made mischief in all of the trials, pre-eminently by attempting to stack the juries with blacks, so as to preclude the killers from getting the death penalty. And he succeeded in all but the case of Davidson, who insisted on being tried by a Knox County jury, which convicted him and sentenced him alone to die. (Davidson will likely turn around, and appeal his own stupidity, and get a good deal of sympathy, in the bargain.) In all other cases, Judge Baumgartner shipped in a jury from a county three times as black as Knox County, because he knew that the likelihood of a jury with more than one black member sentencing a black killer to die was nil, no matter how heinous the crime. But just to be careful, he permitted the defense to stack the juries with as many as seven blacks! And still the defense attorneys complained that too many blacks were being excluded.
Although they were polite and spoke in euphemisms, the victims’ parents had no illusions about Judge Baumgartner’s antics or about the racism of the black jurors whom he bussed into Knox County, as they made clear immediately following the verdict in the Coleman trial.
Chris Newsom’s mother, Mary, said she felt the jury didn’t pay any attention to criminal responsibility or the evidence presented by the prosecution in this case.
Hugh Newsom, Chris’ father, said Coleman needs to spend a lot more time than her possible prison sentence. He also said he felt the jury had a “vendetta” not to give Coleman the maximum sentences.
The Newsoms said they’ll never have any closure or any peace.
“We’ve never had a good outcome with a jury from Nashville [Davidson County]. We don’t have any place to go. We’ve been cheated,” Hugh Newsom said. He added that he felt the jurors were “incompetent.”
Mary Newsom said when Coleman smiled after the verdicts, she looked like “she got away with something.”
Channon Christian’s mother, Deena, said she thought the verdicts showed, “It’s easy to get away with murder in Nashville,” but she admitted she was “shocked” by the decision.
Gary Christian, Channon’s father, said the verdicts were “a joke.”
When asked if they thought the jurors being from Davidson County instead of Knox County got Coleman convicted on lesser charges, Deena said, “I agree wholeheartedly. They didn’t care.”
And in the case of Davidson, Judge Baumgartner lied to the jurors, in claiming that a study had shown that in the state of Tennessee, it was more expensive to execute a killer than to keep him in prison for life.
The report actually stated that “executions save taxpayers $773,736 in prison housing costs compared to incarcerating inmates sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Taxpayers save $680,549 for each execution compared to the cost of housing prisoners sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.”
Considering that black female criminals virtually never get properly punished, even by all-white juries, Judge Baumgartner’s mischief in Coleman’s case was obscene, and caused her to skate on the murder charges altogether. And still, her lawyer tried for ever more leniency. Here, at last, the judge finally said, ‘Enough.’
“She’s already benefited by the jury’s verdict for those (mitigating) factors. She should not in my judgment benefit again by having those factors considered and reducing her sentence.”
In his remarks about her, the judge showed that he was not at all fooled by Coleman. As a Knoxville News Sentinel staffer wrote anonymously last Friday,
KNOXVILLE - Calling her a street-smart teenager with no regard for human life, a Knox County judge today ordered Vanessa Coleman to serve a 53-year prison term for her convictions in the 2007 killings of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom.
“We cannot tolerate this kind of crime,” Judge Richard Baumgartner said.
“Anybody that thinks they can be put in this situation and do nothing about it - I’m telling you it’s unacceptable.”
The judge said an extended sentence was needed to protect the public. Coleman is a danger to society, he said.
The judge said Coleman could have [left] but chose not to leave as the crimes were being committed in January 2007 in and around co-defendant Lemaricus Davidson’s Chipman Street rental home.”
During the sentencing hearing, Channon Christian’s mother, Deena, told Coleman, “‘I guess you wanted souvenirs from your adventure,” … referring to her daughter’s belongings found in Coleman’s possession. ‘That’s sick.’” Deena Christian added that she would be at every parole hearing, to try and stop Coleman from getting off: “I will be there every time, and I will tell them about my nightmare.”
After the sentencing, Deena Christian told the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Jamie Satterfield,
She’s getting away with murder. She should be in life without parole. But we’ll take it.
She was no victim. She was not held against her will. There were multiple times she could have walked out that door. Whether she helped Channon and Chris or not, she was no victim. She said in her own words, she was “learnin,” she was having a great time, she was having a “big adventure….”
I mean, she rode in Channon’s 4-Runner. She had several things of Channon’s in Kentucky with her. Some things that never even got brought back and put into evidence that we identified and saw in pictures. She knew exactly what was going on. She’s getting away with murder.
Jamie Satterfield: Do you think those journal entries came back to haunt her today? Even the judge talked about it.
Deena Christian: Sure they did. There’s no way those were written under duress. If you were being held against your will, would you sit down and write in a journal? I don’t think so. You’d find any way and every way, to get the heck out of Dodge.
And there were multiple times, even when they were in that house, they were asleep. She could have left. When they took Chris, she was there alone with Channon. She could have left.
When she went to the store to buy stuff for breakfast, she didn’t have to come back. She didn’t need a car, she didn’t need a phone. She could have walked right outside the door, there was Waste Connections. She could have walked right down the street to Weigel’s. She could have walked to anywhere, and started screaming.
Channon Christian’s father, Gary, told Satterfield, “Vanessa Coleman was as guilty as Davidson, and should have gotten the death penalty.”
That night, David wrote me,
I’m back home from Knoxville. Judge Baumgartner gave Vanessa Coleman a 53 year sentence. After the sentencing, while being led away, Coleman smiled at winked at her family.
Here is the story from WATE, the ABC station. Here is the story from WVLT, the CBS affiliate. This story is from WBIR, the NBC station.
I stood nearby while the Newsoms were talking to the WVLT reporter. Some distance away, I saw Coleman’s attorney, Theodore Lavit, speaking to a reporter from Kentucky, I believe. I’ll bet you would have like to have asked Lavit a few questions.
The WATE and WLTV segments have two videos each. The WBIR story has several more.
Vanessa Coleman’s father, Greg, gave what WVLT has called “an exclusive interview about a month after the jury found her guilty.” (It’s so brief that, unless the TV station censored most of it, to save the man from leaving himself open to public ridicule—something I’ve known media organizations to do on behalf of racist blacks—the whole thing probably lasted no more than a minute.
Greg Coleman still believes his daughter did nothing wrong in connection with the case.
“How are they going to find someone guilty with not a shred of evidence,” he asked during the interview.
Coleman was convicted in the spring by a Davidson County jury. Her father believes jurors were swayed by lies told on the witness stand.
“Someone else was only trying to save their own neck,” he said of some of the prosecution’s star witnesses. “Such as Daphne [Sutton], when I think of the time frame that she was in the house, I think something should’ve been done there.”
Even though Coleman is now headed to a state prison, her father still insists details about what happened in the Chipman Street house are being withheld.
“There are other people that should’ve been charged in this case that didn’t,” he said.
Coleman acknowledges most people believe his daughter is guilty, but said they’ll continue to support her. He also plans to help her appeal the conviction.
“We can only go forward and try to make the appropriate steps.”
I think the man’s a racist monster, and that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. That he is presumably middle-class, since he was able to hire a private attorney to defend his daughter, is merely more grist for my mill. (But when his money ran low, the predominantly white taxpayers paid the rest.)
Like the vast majority of blacks today, Greg Coleman is an adherent of what I call the paranoid, black supremacist, jailhouse philosophy of law. “Jailhouse,” because it was once typical of racist black jailbirds, but has since become respectable among all black social classes. He doesn’t consider it a crime to harm a white.
As I noted earlier in this article, the evidence against Greg Coleman’s daughter was overwhelming. She incriminated herself during her police interview, her DNA was on the fabric strips used to tie Channon Christian’s wrists, and she was found in possession of items stolen from Christian.
Greg Coleman pointed the finger at Daphne Sutton, for the simple reason that Sutton is white. There is no evidence whatsoever tying Sutton to the rapes, torture, and murders.
That is not to say that Sutton is innocent of all crimes. By her own admission, once she found out that the police were after Davidson, she helped him escape, and then lied to them about having seen him, and about his whereabouts. I have argued that she should be prosecuted as an accessory after the fact, but that is not what Greg Coleman is talking about. He is saying that Sutton should have been prosecuted for his daughter’s crimes, but the only basis he has for that position is his racism.
Prior to the trials, I had feared that Coleman might get off altogether. After all, practically the only time you can be sure of a black woman serving time, is for dealing drugs.
Crystal Gail Mangum, who pulled off the Duke Rape Hoax, had previously, on one night, committed grand theft auto, speeding, DWI, and attempted murder on a police officer, but ended up spending only five nights over three weekends in jail. And for her hoax, she was never charged, and thus never spent a day inside.
Not only were the four blacks on Coleman’s jury automatically sympathetic to her, in all her monstrosity, but some of the six white women were, too!
(Four blacks and six white women? Why, it’s a miracle she was convicted for spitting on the sidewalk! Anyone who follows the criminal justice system knows about the politics of racist black jury nullification, and knows that white women are almost as bad as blacks.)
One of the things the white women were bothered by—as expressed by questions they asked the judge—was their belief that the feds had deceived Coleman, by offering her immunity, in exchange for her cooperation in the federal prosecution against accessory Eric Boyd. They seemed to feel that the feds had deceived Coleman into believing that she would not be prosecuted on the state level, either.
And so they did. But if it was deception, it was perfectly legal. The feds have nothing to say about state prosecutions. And unlike in the case of the feds using phony “civil rights” prosecutions and the sophistic “dual sovereignty theory,” in order to get around double jeopardy, and re-prosecute someone who has been duly acquitted of the same crime in state court, these really were different crimes. The prosecution against Boyd was for carjacking, which is a federal crime. The prosecution against Coleman was for piddling state crimes such as … rape and murder.
And so, white women let a black woman skate for the racially motivated rape and murder of a white woman. What is this, Stockholm Syndrome?
Mario Boone and the Media’s Moral Equivalency … or Worse?
During Coleman’s May trial, WVLT-TV reporter Mario Boone also made some mischief.
What the public didn’t know, was that Boone supported Coleman. Why? Because he’s black. That’s just the way it is. One of the dirty little secrets of affirmative action in journalism is that blacks go into journalism not only to make money off of jobs for which they are unqualified, but in order to help racist black cut throats, through twisting news coverage, and campaigning on their behalf. (See, for some examples, here, here, and here.)
As David wrote on May 8,
Before court on Thursday morning, I saw Gary Christian talking in a hallway with a local TV reporter [Boone] who is sympathetic to the parents of Vanessa Coleman. Vanessa’s father wanted to meet the victims’ families and tell them his sympathy for their loss. The trouble is that the Coleman’s insist their daughter is an innocent victim who was raised to know right from wrong. That nigh, back in my motel room, I saw the Christians asked about this on TV. Gary walked away from the camera and refused to talk. Deena, Channon’s mother, said, “If she was raised to know right from wrong she didn’t learn.” The respective parents avoid each other.
It has become a ritual in recent years for reporters working on black-on-white racial atrocities to get the parents of the white victims together to commiserate with the parents of the black monsters, and present both families in terms of ‘we have both lost family members.’ As if the “loss” of a racist monster going to jail were morally equivalent to the loss of victim he savagely murdered. If the losses were morally equivalent, then where’s the crime?
But no one really believes in moral equivalence. You can either take the side of the victims, or of the monsters. As we see in the case of racist black mass murderer Omar Thornton, the MSM has turned morality upside down, and condemned Thornton’s white victims as “racists” who got what they deserved, while turning the racist monster Thornton into a “victim” of “racism.”
Thus, the MSM is so racist that they will not even permit whites who were victimized by racist black monsters to rage and grieve over the atrocities. The MSM “reporters” must add insult to injury.
A society whose most powerful institution is dominated by people who celebrate and aid and abet evil, and who routinely condemn good people and the victims of evil, cannot long endure.
Previous Trial Results
In the first Knoxville Horror trial, Eric Boyd was convicted in federal court as an accessory after the fact, and sentenced to 18 years in prison on October 15, 2008.
Letalvis Cobbins was convicted on 33 felony counts, including almost all major charges (murder, aggravated rape, etc.), and was sentenced to “life without parole” on August 25, 2009, which was later enhanced to “life plus 100 years.”
On October 29, 2009, Lemaricus Davidson was convicted on 35 out of 38 state felony counts, including all major charges, and two days later was sentenced to death. (In the state of Tennessee all death sentences are automatically appealed.)
And on December 8, 2009, George Thomas was convicted of all 38 charges against him; on March 4, 2010, Judge Baumgartner sentenced Thomas to two consecutive life terms in prison.
The killers and their accomplices will all be appealing their verdicts, and so we have hardly seen the last of them. But the national MSM will try their best to suppress news about them, a job at which they have so far done a bang-up job. And I will continue doing the job the MSM refuse to do.
When the MSM failed, in spring 2007, to suppress knowledge of the atrocity, they and Knoxville authorities went to Plan B, which was to lie through their teeth about the crime’s transparently racial character, and to demonize as “white supremacists” anyone (including this writer) who complained about the suppression, or who refused to parrot the politically correct talking points.
Just after killer George Thomas’ police interview in Kentucky on January 11, 2007 had concluded, he exclaimed, “F--k that white girl, she don’t mean nothing to me!”
Knoxville police suppressed Thomas’ racist statement for almost three years.
Ringleader Lemaricus Davidson had been a member of the racist gang, the Black Gangster Disciples, while serving a token prison sentence for an earlier carjacking.
And most tellingly, as the blogger A Race Against Time showed, Davidson led his criminal cohorts to kidnap, rape, and murder Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom only one day after Davidson’s white girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, had left him, after his constant beatings. John Gill, a spokesman for District Attorney General Randy Nichols, had argued that because Davidson & Co. “socialized” (read: had sex) with whites, that the crime could not have been racially motivated. That was pure sophistry, because authorities never permit whites’ sexual involvement with blacks to be used to exculpate them from charges of “hate crimes” against blacks and because, as Eldridge Cleaver admitted over 40 years ago in Soul on Ice, racist black men who are obsessed with having consensual sex with white women, are also obsessed with raping white women.
