"Connecticut Man Sentenced to Death in Three Killings," is the AP filing, via the New York Times.
A federal judge sentenced a Connecticut drug dealer to death on Monday for the 2005 killings of three people in Bridgeport in a turf dispute over crack cocaine sales.Judge Janet Bond Arterton of United States District Court imposed the sentence on the drug dealer, Azibo Aquart, 31, the first federal court defendant in Connecticut to receive the death penalty since federal capital punishment was reinstated in 1988. Mr. Aquart’s lawyer vowed to appeal the sentence.
Prosecutors said Mr. Aquart, his brother and two other men took part in the killings of Tina Johnson, 43, James Reid, 40, and Basil Williams, 54, who were beaten to death with baseball bats on Aug. 24, 2005, and found bound with duct tape in Ms. Johnson’s apartment.
The authorities said Ms. Johnson had been selling crack cocaine on Mr. Aquart’s drug turf in the Charles Street Apartments without his permission. Prosecutors said Mr. Aquart and his associates were involved in numerous acts of violence to maintain control over their drug-selling activities in the apartment complex.
"Baseball-bat killer gets federal death sentence," is by Michael P. Mayko at CT Post.
For the first time in Connecticut's federal court history, a judge sentenced a defendant to death for the brutal baseball-bat beatings of three duct-taped victims in a Bridgeport apartment house.Azibo Aquart, minus the customary dreadlocks that earned him the street name `Dreddy," showed no emotion while U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton handed down the sentence imposed by a jury on June 15, 2011.
She ordered Aquart, 32, taken to the special confinement unit at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., where he will join 57 others on death row.
The judge also ordered a portion of Aquart's future puny prison job earnings be used to repay the $17,106 in funeral expenses the three victims' families incurred.
Related posts are in the federal death penalty category index.
Comments