True Crime Stories

This will be my fourth case that involves a death penalty case out of the state of Kentucky. One would think so many of them would be rather routine or at least similar in nature, but if these four cases show anything it shows that anything can happen, every case is different and you never know what legal maneuvers will be tried and which ones will fail and which ones will succeed. Some only succeed temporarily. Marco Chapman murdered two children, injured their mother and sister and in the end volunteered for the death penalty. Yet the courts had to decide if he had that right. Thomas Bowling Jr. was convicted and sentenced to death for the killing a couple in their car and shooting their son but in my opinion there was insufficient evidence. He died in prison of cancer. John Garland was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of three people. He maintained his innocence until his natural death in prison, blaming his son. This latest case is one in which David Matthe...

I have mentioned many times in the past that when cases make it to my list of cases to research they often fall in groups with related topics or places. I do not always do them obviously in any sort of order. It depends on my mood at the moment but sometimes, like now, you will notice the trend because my last two blogs were about men who were sentenced to death in Kentucky, and here we are with another one. This is a case that going into it I thought was probably pretty cut and dry but then the more I dug, the more issues I saw. We all know that court cases come down to who the jury believes in the end. This was a case that pitted father against son inside the courtroom. It is seemingly a case that continued to pit father against son until the father died in prison in 2018. Before I want to start telling the story I want to clear up something that I was confused about at first. The first thing that I came across was a Murderpedia page that took the facts of the crime fr...

There are certain things that are so commonly heard in murder cases that they sometimes seem so routine and mundane. One of the biggest things you will hear is the argument about “ineffective counsel.” I have actually read an appeal in which a judge discusses his disdain for this phrase as that seems to be a “given” in an appeal after a conviction. He is not wrong but the sadder part about that is that there are cases in which ineffective counsel is very valid but it can get lost in the shuffle because so many make this claim. Now, let me be clear that while Bowling would basically make this claim after his conviction, personally to the judge and not necessarily through an appeal, I have to say I agreed with the judge on this point, one of the very few it seems, when it was denied. Another thing you hear a lot, if not more than the claim of ineffective counsel, is that the defendant is innocent. More often than not state prosecutors (or federal attorney generals if it applies)...