Prosecutor cites robbery in brother slaying

Christopher Horton, 28, killed his brother, Adam Horton, during an armed robbery on Sept. 2, 2007, in Bayou Vista, said Anthony Saleme, assistant district attorney, during opening arguments this morning.
A jury of six men and six women was selected Monday for the trial.
Saleme said, “After hearing the testimony and viewing the physical evidence, you will be comfortable finding Mr. Horton guilty of first-degree murder. ... Mr. Horton killed his brother with specific intent” and it was done in the course of an armed robbery.
Robert Fuhrer, Christopher Horton’s attorney, said, “There are two sides to every coin and two sides to every story. ... My client is guilty of something, but it is not first- or second-degree murder,” but of another choice such as manslaughter.
Saleme said he expects the trial to run through Thursday.
Two other people were arrested in the case. Jimmy Wright received an automatic life sentence after a second-degree murder conviction. Horton’s wife, Earline, pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and was given a five-year prison sentence.
In pleading guilty on June 5, 2009, Earline Horton, accepted as factual the prosecutor’s contention that she had knowledge of the two men committing “a homicide and did ... participate and was present during the disposal of certain pieces of evidence.” She agreed to testify consistent with statements she made to police regarding her husband and Wright that implicated the two men in the killing.
Saleme, who is prosecuting the case, said Earline Horton will be called to testify. It remains to be seen if Wright will be called to testify, and even if he is, there is no assurance he would not invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not testify since he is appealing his case, he said.
Wright and Earline Horton gave statements to police in the 2007 investigations that finger Christopher Horton as the one inflicting the fatal knife wound. Christopher Horton, who was 22 at the time of the killing, claimed in his initial statement to police that he was merely the lookout in a robbery in which Wright killed his brother, who was 25 at the time.
The jury will not hear the statements given by Horton, as District Judge Paul deMahy ruled last week they are inadmissible because Horton’s intellectual capacity precluded him from being able to understand the significance of waiving his right to an attorney while being questioned.
Earline Horton told police her husband and Wright came home the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day wearing bloody clothes and with a lot of money, stating they had robbed someone, the arrest affidavit said. She said she drove the men to a boat landing near Patterson and threw a knife in the bayou and later that night her husband told her he had killed his brother, the affidavit said.
Transcripts of Wright’s 2009 trial state Wright said Horton and his wife had been planning to rob Adam Horton ever since Wright began staying with them when he came into town from Alabama about a week earlier.
Wright told police there was bad blood between the two brothers because Adam Horton filed a complaint the week before regarding his house being burglarized and accused Christopher Horton of being a party to the break-in, according to the transcripts from the trial.
Wright claimed a burglary was planned and they went there to rough up Adam Horton in the process, the transcripts states. Wright told police in one of the interviews that he slammed Adam Horton against a wall and then suddenly Christopher Horton “jugged,” or stabbed, the victim in the chest with a knife Wright admitted belonged to him.
Christopher Horton told police Wright stabbed and killed the victim while he stayed in front of the mobile home as a lookout. After hearing a commotion, Christopher Horton said he walked to the back of the home where he saw Adam Horton lying in a pool of blood, the arrest affidavit states. He claimed to have not had any physical conflict with his brother during the incident.
Christopher Horton was eventually ruled by a sanity commission as unfit to assist in his defense and he was committed for 17 months to a state mental facility. He was determined competent for trial on May 17, 2011.
Court documents show Horton has been assessed by state examiners as mildly retarded. Psychiatric evaluations by two separate psychiatrists in 2007 and 2008 determined Horton had an IQ of 68 and 64, respectively.
Fuhrer said Monday that because of his client’s IQ, this will not be a capital case with a possible death sentence. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that imposing the death penalty on a retarded person is unconstitutional and is cruel and unusual punishment.
Psychologist James Pinkston evaluated Horton over two days in October 2012 and reported that Horton was “not suffering from significant mental illness or defect at the time of the alleged offense sufficient to render him incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong.” Horton was referred to Pinkston by Fuhrer.
deMahy has held off ruling, “until an appropriate time,” on whether a statement from a cellmate purported to be a confession written at Horton’s behest can be used. His cellmate said in the statement that he was writing the letter because Horton was “illiterate.”
In that statement, Horton claimed to have knifed his brother when he caught him having sex with his wife and Wright. The details of that confession conflict in several ways with the statements of several others, primarily in the fact that he claimed his wife was not staying with him at the time of the killing.