ATLANTA (AP) — The new judge presiding over the racketeering and gang prosecution of rapper Young Thug and several other defendants said Friday she plans to move forward expeditiously with the trial, which has already dragged on for more than a year.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker held a hearing with prosecutors and defense attorneys to understand any pending issues she needed to address and lay down some ground rules.
Whitaker received the case after the first judge overseeing it, Chief Judge Ural Glanville, was removed. Two defendants had sought his recusal, citing a meeting the judge held with prosecutors and a state witness.
Jury selection began in January 2023 and took nearly 10 months. Opening statements were in November, and the prosecution has been presenting its case since then, calling dozens of witnesses.
Whitaker said she was “parachuting in” and had not been following the case.
The case is currently on hold, with jurors due back in August. Whitaker said she plans to start court promptly at 8:45 a.m. She also asked for a “realistic” witness list from attorneys, including what they expect those witnesses to say.
She noted she had the authority to exclude evidence and said she could use it.
“I need for us to try to be efficient with the jury’s time,” she said.
Young Thug, a Grammy winner whose given name is Jeffery Williams, was charged two years ago in a sprawling indictment accusing him and more than two dozen others of conspiring to violate Georgia’s anti-racketeering law. He also is charged with gang, drug and gun crimes.
He is standing trial with five other people indicted with him.
Brian Steel, a lawyer for Young Thug, has said his client is innocent and seeks to clear his name through a fair trial.
FILE - Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, appears at a hearing, Dec. 22, 2022, in Atlanta. The new judge presiding over the racketeering and gang prosecution of rapper Young Thug and several other defendants said Friday, July 19, 2024, that the trial has gone on for a really long time and she plans to move it forward expeditiously. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
LONDON (AP) — An American woman accused of killing her two youngest children in Colorado last December told her 11-year-old daughter who survived the attack that God made her do it, a prosecutor said in a London court.
The girl begged for her life after Kimberlee Singler stabbed her and — despite the child's plea for mercy — cut her again, prosecutor Joel Smith said.
The harrowing details came as Singler fights extradition to the United States in Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
Singler denies attacking her children and is concerned her daughter's statement to police was coerced, defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald said.
Singler should not be extradited from the United Kingdom because if she’s convicted of first-degree murder in the U.S. state of Colorado, where the killings took place, she would face life without parole — a sentence that violates European human rights law, Fitzgerald argued on Friday.
Singler, 36, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting and stabbings of her 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, and one count of attempted murder for harming her older daughter.
She faces additional counts because the children were under the age of 12, along with an additional count of assault.
Fitzgerald, who represented Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his long extradition fight to face espionage charges in the U.S., argued that life without parole would be inhuman because it offers no prospect for release even if she is rehabilitated.
Despite the possibility that the sentence could be commuted by a Colorado governor, that would amount to “political suicide,” Fitzgerald said, citing experts who said it had not been done before.
“In Colorado, as a matter of history and political reality, there is no realistic prospect of release, whatever progress is made,” Fitzgerald said. “No matter how bad the crime, there should be some opportunity of release.”
As Fitzgerald was winding up his argument, Smith rose to say he had become aware of evidence that former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper had commuted first-degree murder sentences of six men in 2018.
Judge John Zani then adjourned the three-day hearing “in light of potentially important information" until Dec. 2 to allow lawyers to confirm a news report about the commutations and provide further arguments.
Singler, who is in custody, was in the dock and only spoke to acknowledge that she understood why the hearing was being continued.
The hearing was primarily focused on the legal issues surrounding extradition.
On Wednesday, Smith outlined new details in his opening statement.
He said that at the time of the killings, Singler was in a custody battle with her ex-husband, Kevin Wentz. He had been awarded more time with the children and she had been ordered to turn them over to him from Dec. 16-31, but had not done so.
Shortly after midnight on Dec. 19, Singler made an emergency call to Colorado Springs police.
Officers found the two youngest children, Aden Wentz, 7, and Elianna “Ellie” Wentz, 9, dead in bed together in their apartment. They had been shot and stabbed, Smith said.
Singler's older daughter, identified in court papers only by her initials, M.W., was seriously wounded.
Singler, who had superficial knife wounds, was initially considered a victim in what was reported as a burglary, police said.
“She would later tell police that she had woken on (Dec. 18) feeling ‘weird’ and ‘woozy,’ and that the children had seemed drowsy as well,” Smith said. “She said that she suspected her former partner (the children’s father) of killing them, or organizing to have them killed. She said that a ‘dark figure’ had entered her apartment and that she had fainted.”
Singler's ex-husband, however, had a solid alibi, Smith said. He was driving a truck that had GPS tracking.
The daughter who survived her attack initially told police that a man entered their home from the patio and attacked them. But after recovering from her wounds and being transferred to a foster home, she told a caretaker that her mother was responsible and had asked her to lie to police.
The girl said Singler gave the children milk with a powdery medicine to drink and told them to close their eyes as she guided them into one of the children's bedrooms, Smith said.
“The defendant told her that God was telling her to do it, and that the children’s father would take them away,” Smith said.
DNA tests on the weapons found a mixture of blood matching the children and their mother. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was also found in the house.
After her daughter changed her story, police sought to arrest Singler on Dec. 26 in Colorado but she had fled abroad. She was caught in London’s posh Chelsea neighborhood four days later.
Colorado Springs Police Department investigators and officers work on the scene of a burglary that resulted in the deaths of two people at the Palomino Ranch apartment complex on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 in Colorado Springs, Colo. ( Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP)
Colorado Springs Police Department investigators and officers work on the scene of a burglary that resulted in the deaths of two people at the Palomino Ranch apartment complex on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP)
