Cox denied “substantive” defense motions, citing 2010 “run-away jury” verdict that led higher courts to overturn Ewing/Searcy murder convictions
Ewing to Cox: ” Where is justice at, your honor? When are you going to switch your hat from prosecutor to judge?”
Ewing files motion to disqualify Cox, citing: appearance of impropriety, due process denials, actual bias/prejudice, MCR 2.003(e) re: previous employment with WCPO in last year
Cox was WCPO Asst. Prosecutor from 2018-22, worked under APs Kam Towns, Jon Wojtala, architects of the 2010 Ewing/Searcy conviction in 2010. Cox took bench Jan. 1, 2023.
Cox family dynasty, led by former Republican Mich. AG Mike Cox, who sponsored campaign at his offices, donated most campaign funds
“Undisclosed” Podcast series analyzed evidence in Ewing/Searcy case at https://undisclosed-podcast.com//episodes/state-v-darrell-ewing/ Episodes included in story.
Next: TRIAL BEGINS MARCH 25, 2024; Cox refused motion to separate defendants, but is holding separate hearings anyway; no opportunity for each defendant, atty. to hear other’s case
By Diane Bukowski
December 12, 2023
FAMILY, SUPPORTERS OF APPLE AND REEK: PLZ DONATE TO VOD https://www.gofundme.com/donate-to-vod Cash App at (313) 825-6126 (any amount welcome, still raising funds for $46o.oo December web host fee, final deadline Dec. 19, 2023
#FreeDarrell,#FreeApple,#FreeReek,#FreeDemBoys,#mrbeattheodds
“Where is the justice, your honor? When are you going to switch your hat from prosecutor to Judge? How are you even sitting on my case?” Ewing asked 3rd Circuit Court Judge Kiefer Cox during his pre-trial hearing Dec. 1. Cox had just issued a blanket denial of “substantive” defense motions, including those alleging pre-trial Brady v. Maryland 1963 violations (failure to disclose evidence).
“I just learned that you came out of the prosecutor’s office a couple of months ago and you are friends with Kym Worthy and Jon Wojtala,” Ewing said. “That’s actual bias!. . . Everything you said, your honor, was in line with something the prosecutor said.”
Ewing and his co-defendant Derrico Searcy are being re-tried after 3rd Circuit Court Judge Michael Hathaway and U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page-Hood overturned their convictions for the 2009 murder of J.B. Watson in rulings in 2017 and 2019. They cited rampant misconduct by a run-away jury that researched “gangs” and other matters on the Internet and Facebook. AP’s Kam Towns and Jon Wojtala were the chief architects of the duo’s convictions, with their theory of the case alleging the Watson killing was part of a gang war.
Richard Phillips
Ewing said WCCC Judge Kevin Cox, Judge Kiefer Cox’s father, “had the balls” to exonerate Richard Phillips in 2018, after 45 years in prison, and asked Cox to follow suit. Phillips was the longest-serving exoneree in the U.S. at the time.
Kam Towns now works in Mich. AG office.
Cox also denied Ewing’s motions for Wade and Franks evidentiary hearings, including one on the key testimony of Raymond and Jendayi Love, both white, who identified Ewing and Searcy at trial as the killers. (Their testimony is analyzed by experts in Undisclosed Podcast #3 below.)
He denied a motion to produce the internal disciplinary records of Chief Investigative Officer Theophilus Williams and another officer involved in the case who had been sued for federal civil rights violations, saying those documents are privileged and “lawsuits are filed everyday.” Regarding Ewing’s allegations that trial AP Kam Towns had not turned over exculpatory documents in 2010, he repeatedly ruled that Towns said in a letter that it “would have been her practice” to turn them over, therefore she had turned them over.
Ewing’s supporters applaud and cheer Dec. 1, 2023.
Cox impugned Ewing’s credibility, claiming his motions contained falsehoods. Ewing challenged Cox’s rulings at length, and has since filed a motion to disqualify him with detailed, documented rebuttals.
At the close of the hearing, dozens of Ewing’s supporters in the courtroom applauded loudly as they filed out. Larry Smith, Jr, exonerated in 2021 of false murder charges for which he had spent 26 years in prison, told VOD he is now organizing support for Ewing among exonerees nationally.
Larry Smith, Jr. Dec. 1
“Darrell Ewing did a very great job,” Smith said. “Having himself in the courtroom, he considered that the evidence the prosecutor presented was clearly false. I’m very disappointed in the court making very poor rulings multiple rulings that Darrell dispelled, and he didn’t even take into reconsideration his actions. Judge (thumbs down). Darrell keep holding on.”
Ewing’s motion to disqualify Cox cites, “the appearance of impropriety, due process infringements, and actual bias/prejudice.”
He cites MCR 2.003(e) (a judge can be disqualified, if “[he/she was partner of a party, atty. for a party, or member of a law firm representing the party within the preceding two years.”
In the motion. Ewing rebuts Cox’s claims in documented detail, including Cox’s denial that eyewitness Raymond Love said at trial that his first pick in a photo line-up was wrong, and that after he picked Ewing, the officer told him that was the right one. Ewing cites the trial transcripts showing Cox’ error.
http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Darrell-Ewing-motion-to-recuse-Judge-Cox.pdf
Judge Cox, with not even one year on the bench, cited the runaway jury’s verdict in denying Ewing’s motions, including one objecting to the prosecution’s suppression of information about the driver of the green Aurora which brought the real killer, Tyrone Washington to the scene, as Washington testified in a Mirandized confession given to the Michigan State Police in 2017.
“The jury obviously didn’t buy that defense or argument, in that they found a verdict of guilty,” Cox said.
Juror misconduct
He evidently ignored the detailed rulings made by WCCC Judge Michael Hathaway and U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood, who each have decades of experience on the bench. Both excoriated the jury conduct in the 2010 trial, which included extraneous research they conducted on the Internet and Facebook about “gangs.”
“That’s textbook law,” VOD legal analyst Travis Herndon, who attended the hearing, said. “When a conviction has been overturned due to jury misconduct, then that jury finding as a whole is invalid. It has no force of law. When a judge during the pre-trial stages of a retrial, denies a motion based on the fact-findings of a run-away jury, it is clear the court lacks an understanding of the law.”
Multiple courts have held that a jury verdict that has been overturned by higher courts is no longer of effect.
“In Peterson, the Western District cited Sixth Circuit case law broadly holding that a “judgment that has been vacated, reversed, or set aside on appeal is thereby deprived of all conclusive effect, both as res judicata and as collateral estoppel.” Peterson v. Heymes, 277 F. Supp. 3d 913 https://casetext.com/case/peterson-v-heymes.
Driver’s side distortion
Testimony of Raymond Love
Judge Hathaway specifically said Love’s testimony was “virtually impossible to imagine.” (See Hathaway’s comments below, followed by one of four original podcasts on the case done by “Undisclosed” which exposes the Love’s ID as undependable. “Undisclosed features a panel of experts in law, forensics. and other criminal justice areas.
The Ewing/Searcy jury based its guilty verdict on their illegal internet research on “gangs.” They discounted testimony that the actual killer, Tyree Washington, confessed to the murder. They even convinced the lone juror hold-out the day of the verdict that Washington was part of a “gang hierarchy” and sacrificed himself for Ewing. That was never testified to at trial, although AP Kam Towns’ theory of the case was that Watson’s murder was part of a gang feud. Washington denied this in his Mirandized confession to the Michigan State Police in 2017.
Eyewitnesses? Multiple Ewing family members testified at trial that he was at a memorial repast for his grandmother’s friend during the time of the J.B. Watson murder.
Darrell Ewing’s mother LaSonya Dodson Dec.1
Such testimony from family members is frequently discounted as biased by police and prosecutors, with no specific findings of fact. In Michigan, however, its Supreme Court overturned this long-time practice in the case of People v. Hammock, 946 N.W.2d 546 (Mich. 2020). Justice Megan Cavanagh, who wrote the ruling, countered conservative Justice Stephen Markman’s opinion that an affidavit by a witness who was 12 at the time of the crime, and was incarcerated with the defendant years later was not believable.
“Justice MARKMAN expresses disbelief that Carter was selling marijuana at 2 a.m. when he was 13 years old, that Carter and defendant happened to be incarcerated together eight years later, and that Carter happened upon the Court of Appeals opinion affirming defendant’s conviction. In Justice MARKMAN’S view, this version of events “lacks an air of credibility ….” And yet, it is true that people in prison run into past acquaintances, that some people serving long prison sentences spend long hours in the law library falling down legal rabbit holes, and that some of those people were selling marijuana at 2 a.m. when they were 13 years old. These experiences are unlike my own, and though I cannot speak for him, they may also be unlike Justice MARKMAN ’s. ”
THE ORIGINS OF YOUNG JUDGE KIEFER JOSEPH COX, AGE 35
Judge Kiefer J. Cox was elected in November, 2022, after a campaign chiefly financed by himself and his family members. Campaign finance documents show that former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, hosted the campaign out of his law offices in Livonia, as well as sponsoring a fund-raiser there. He and his wife Laura Cox. a former GOP state chair, contributed a total of $14, 300 to the campaign. The family’s total was $56,475, out of overall contributions of $97, 000. Cox had only a write-in opponent who got one percent of the vote.
The Cox family agenda is questionable. Among other concerns, Mike Cox initiated a virulent campaign targeting so-called “deadbeat dads” in Michigan in 2003.
This reporter covered that campaign as a reporter for the Michigan Citizen, pointing out that it unfairly targeted poor men, and Black men in particular, who already comprise at least 53 percent of the state’s prison population as compared to 14 percent of the general population. Most child support payments go to the state to repay it if the custodial parent received support for the children from the “Family Independence Agency,” as it was called at the time.
“We’ve talked before on this show about the anti-father campaign going on in Michigan over the past year,” radio host Glenn Sacks said at the time.
“Attorney General Mike Cox is politically savvy and he’s found a good way to ride into a higher office—beat up on so-called deadbeat dads. Cox has had billboards boasting of jail time for fathers struggling with child support obligations all over Michigan and the legislature has upped the penalties for non-payment of support. Yet at the same time a recent Michigan Family Independence Agency study admits that “87 percent of all child support arrearages are owed by those earning less than $10,000 a year.”
CHANNEL 4 DETROIT COVERAGE DEC. 1
VOD VIDEOS OF JUDGE KIEFER COX’S RULINGS AT HEARING DEC. 1
RELATED DOCUMENTS AND STORIES:
Judge Denise Page Hood’s opinion on remand from 6th Circuit Court: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Opinion-on-remand-Ewing_v_Woods__miedce-15-10523__0016.0.pdf
U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood’s order for new trial: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Darrell-Ewing-habeas-corpus-grant-1.pdf
Transcript of Judge Michael Hathaway’s order for a new trial: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Darrell-Ewing-Derrico-Searcy-Remmer-Hearing-Transcripts.pdf Excerpt below:
WCCC Judge Kevin Cox ruling: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Phillips-opinion_and_order_granting_motion_for_relief_from_judgment-2017.pdf
DID PROS. KYM WORTHY AND DPD SUPPRESS KILLER’S CONFESSION IN EWING/SEARCY CASE? HEARING DEC. 1 | VOICE OF DETROIT: The city’s independent newspaper, unbossed and unbought
*********************************************************************************
Voice of Detroit is a pro bono newspaper, now devoting itself entirely to stories related to our PRISON NATION and POLICE STATE. Funds are needed regularly to pay quarterly web hosting fee of $460.00 and other expenses. VOD will disappear from the web if fee not paid.
VOD’s editors and reporters, most of whom live on fixed incomes or are incarcerated, are not paid for their work. Ongoing costs include quarterly web charges of $460.00, P.O. box fee of $180/yr. and other costs including utility and internet bills, costs for research including court records and internet fees, office supplies, gas, etc.
Please DONATE TO VOD at:
https://www.gofundme.com/donate-to-vod
Cash App at $MDianeBukowski (313) 825-6126
***********************************************************************************
