BOISE, Idaho (AP) — An Idaho prosecutor says he will seek the death penalty against an Idaho inmate charged with killing a man while he was on the lam during a 36-hour escape from prison.
Skylar Meade, 32, has already been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to the March escape from a Boise hospital, where prison officials had taken him for treatment of self-inflicted injuries. But the first-degree murder charge is in a different county, and Meade has not yet had the opportunity to enter a plea in that case. Meade's defense attorney, Rick Cuddihy, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Nez Perce County Prosecutor Justin Coleman announced Friday that he will seek the death penalty if Meade is convicted in the shooting death of James Mauney.
“After long and careful consideration I have decided to seek the death penalty in this case,” Coleman wrote in the press release. “The senseless and random killing of Mr. Mauney and the facts surrounding what lead to his death, warrants this determination.”
Meade's alleged accomplice in the escape, Nicholas Umphenour, 29, has also been indicted in connection with Mauney's death, and had not yet had the opportunity to enter a plea. Umphenour is also awaiting trial on charges including aggravated battery and aiding and abetting escape after a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. Umphenour's defense attorney, Brian Marx, did not immediately respond to a voice message.
The case began in the early morning hours of March 20 after the Idaho Department of Correction brought Meade to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center for treatment of self-inflicted injuries. Prosecutors say that as correctional officers prepared to take Meade back to the prison around 2 a.m., an accomplice outside the hospital began shooting.
Nicholas Umphenour shot two of the correctional officers, prosecutors say. A third officer was shot and injured when a fellow police officer mistook him for the shooter and opened fire. All three of the officers survived their injuries.
Meade and Umphenour fled the scene, investigators said, first driving several hours to north-central Idaho.
Mauney, an 83-year-old Juliaetta resident, didn't return home from walking his dogs on a local trail later that morning. Idaho State Police officials said Mauney's body was found miles away.
The grand jury indictment says Meade is accused of either shooting shooting Mauney as he tried to rob the man or aiding another person in the killing. Police have also said that Meade and Umphenour are suspects in the death of Gerald Don Henderson, 72, who was found outside of his home in a nearby town. Henderson's death remains under investigation and neither Meade nor Umphenour have been charged.
Police say the men left north-central Idaho not long after, heading back to the southern half of the state. They were arrested in Twin Falls roughly 36 hours after the hospital attack.
Police described both men as white supremacist gang members who had been incarcerated at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Kuna, at times housed in the same unit.
At the time of the escape, Meade was serving a 20-year sentence for shooting at a sheriff’s sergeant during a high-speed chase. Umphenour was released in January after serving time on charges of grand theft and unlawful possession of a weapon.
Meade is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on the murder charge.
FILE - In this photo made from body camera footage and released by the Twin Falls, Idaho, Police Department, Skylar Meade, right, is arrested in Twin Falls on Thursday, March 21, 2024. An Idaho prosecutor says he will seek the death penalty against an Idaho inmate charged with killing a man while he was on the lam during a 36-hour escape from prison. (Twin Falls Police Department via AP, File)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean commission found evidence that women were pressured into giving away their infants for foreign adoptions after giving birth at government-funded facilities where thousands of people were confined and enslaved from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday came years after The Associated Press revealed adoptions from the biggest facility for so-called vagrants, Brothers Home, which shipped children abroad as part of a huge, profit-seeking enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped within the compound in the port city of Busan. Thousands of children and adults — many of them grabbed off the streets — were enslaved in such facilities and often raped, beaten or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.
The commission was launched in December 2020 to review human rights violations linked to the country’s past military governments. It had previously found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers. Its latest report is focused on four similar facilities in the cities of Seoul and Daegu and the provinces of South Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. Like Brothers, these facilities were operated to accommodate government roundups aimed at beautifying the streets.
Ha Kum Chul, one of the commission’s investigators, said inmate records show at least 20 adoptions occurred from Daegu’s Huimangwon and South Chungcheong province’s Cheonseongwon in 1985 and 1986. South Korea sent more than 17,500 children abroad in those two years as its foreign adoption program peaked.
Ha said children taken from inmates at Huimangwon and Cheonseongwon were mostly newborns, who were transferred to two adoption agencies, Holt Children’s Services and Eastern Social Welfare Society, which placed them with families in the United States, Denmark, Norway and Australia. Most of the infants were transferred to the agencies on the day of their birth or the day after, Ha said, indicating that their adoptions were determined pre-birth.
While the facilities’ records say some of the women submitted memos expressing their consent to give away their children, other records indicate women were being pressured to do so, Ha said. A 1985 inmate record from Huimangwon flags a 42-year-old inmate with supposed mental health issues for “causing problems” by refusing to relinquish her child. Officials later note that she eventually did.
“It’s difficult to accurately determine how many more adopted children there might have been in other years,” Ha said, citing the commission’s limitations in staff. For Huimangwon, Ha said, the commission was only able to look through its inmate records from 1985 and 1986 and still found 14 adoptions. A further six adoptions were linked to inmates at Cheonseongwon.
At their peak, Huimangwon had about 1,400 inmates and Cheonseongwon 1,200. That was still smaller than the population at Brothers, which exceeded 3,000.
Holt and Eastern did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the commission’s findings.
Through documents obtained from officials, lawmakers or through public information requests, the AP in 2019 found direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of Brothers between 1979 and 1986, and indirect evidence suggesting at least 51 more adoptions.
About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted to the United States, Europe and Australia in the past six decades, creating what’s believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. Most of the adoptions occurred during the 1970s and ’80s, when South Korea’s then-military leaders were focused on economic growth and saw adoptions as a tool to reduce the number of mouths to feed, erase the “social problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.
The commission has also been conducting a separate investigation into the cases of 367 Korean adoptees in Europe, the United States and Australia, who suspect their biological origins were manipulated to facilitate their adoptions. It’s expected to release an interim report on that later this year.
The commission also identified other human rights problems at the four facilities it highlighted on Monday, which also included Gaengsaengwon in Seoul and Seonghyewon in Gyeonggi province. The facilities’ death tolls were high — the 262 inmates who were reported as dead from Gaengsaengwon in 1980 accounted for more than 25% of the facility’s population that year, Ha said.
Nearly 120 bodies of Cheonseongwon inmates were provided to a local medical school for anatomy practice from 1982 to 1992, the commission said. Most of the bodies were transferred to the school on the day the inmates were declared dead or the day after, and there are no indications that the facility made efforts to transfer the bodies to relatives, according to the commission, which didn't identify the school.
Huimangwon, Seonghyewon and Cheonseongwon also regularly received inmates transferred from Brothers, suggesting a “revolving-door” labor-sharing scheme between facilities that likely increased profit and prolonged the inmates’ confinements, the commission said.
The population at South Korea’s vagrant facilities peaked in the 1980s as the then-military government intensified roundups to beautify streets ahead of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games held in Seoul. South Korea transitioned to a democracy in the late 1980s and has long stopped its practice of grabbing homeless people, the disabled and children off the streets and confining them.
Brothers closed in 1988, months after a prosecutor exposed its horrors. Seonghyewon now runs welfare programs for homeless people in the city of Hwaseong, while the three other facilities have changed their names and the services they provide. None of those facilities immediately released comments following the commission's report.
“The four confinement facilities had been allowed to continue their operations without receiving any public investigations even after 1987,” when Brothers was exposed, said Lee Sang Hoon, one of the commission’s standing commissioners. “It’s significant that we have comprehensively revealed the details of the human rights violations at (other) vagrant facilities across the country that had been concealed for 37 years.”
Ha Kum Chul, one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigators, speaks to the media during a news conference at the commission in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (Im Hwa-young/Yonhap via AP)
Lee Sang Hoon, a standing commissioner, speaks to the media during a news conference at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (Im Hwa-young/Yonhap via AP)
