Murders Alabama

The mastermind of what prosecutors portrayed as a murderous marijuana ring was sentenced to death Tuesday, making him the first person to receive the death sentence under a 3-year-old federal law. David Ronald Chandler, 37, of Piedmont, Ala., was convicted on all nine counts in an indictment charging that he directed a major drug ring that operated in Alabama and Georgia and killed a police informer. "I'm not guilty," Chandler told U.S. Dist. Judge James H.

A jury recommended Wednesday that a convicted drug kingpin become the first person in the nation sentenced to death under a 1988 federal law allowing capital punishment in drug-related killings. David Ronald Chandler was tight-lipped but showed no emotion when the jurors made their unanimous recommendation after deliberating for 90 minutes.

The same typewriter that prepared labels on packages containing mail bombs that killed a federal judge and a civil rights lawyer was used to write death threats against at least 16 other federal judges, prosecutors said in Atlanta. Mail bombs killed U.S. 11th Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance in Mountain Brook, Ala., and lawyer Robert Robinson, a Savannah, Ga., alderman, in December, 1989. Walter Leroy Moody Jr., 56, of Rex, Ga.

The suspect in the 1989 bombing deaths of a federal judge in Alabama and a Georgia civil rights lawyer could be sentenced to 69 years in prison on a conviction linked to a 1972 bomb possession case. A federal jury in Brunswick, Ga., found Walter Leroy Moody Jr. guilty on 13 counts of bribery, obstruction of justice and witness tampering in an attempt to have his 1972 federal bomb possession conviction overturned.

A man charged in mail bombings that killed a federal judge and a lawyer refused Thursday to enter a plea, pending his attempt to bar any federal judge from hearing the case. In a hearing before a federal magistrate, lawyers for Walter Leroy Moody Jr. said the fact that a federal judge was one of the victims damages the impartiality of all federal judges. Moody's attorneys requested in a court motion that the Senate Judiciary Committee appoint an independent officer to hear the case. U.S.

A Georgia man "obsessed" with a legal dispute was indicted Wednesday for the 1989 mail-bomb murders of federal appellate Judge Robert S. Vance and Robert E. Robinson, a Savannah, Ga., NAACP attorney. A federal grand jury in Atlanta also charged Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in a 70-count indictment with sending other mail bombs to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the NAACP office at Jacksonville, Fla.

A federal judge on Friday ordered a man who has been the focus of an investigation into fatal mail bombings held without bail until his trial on unrelated charges of witness tampering. Judge Wilbur D. Owens Jr. set a tentative trial date of Sept. 17 for Walter Leroy Moody Jr., 56. He ruled that Moody's wife, Susan McBride Moody, 28, could be released on a $250,000 property bond.

A job applicant who speaks English with a thick foreign accent may be denied employment without violating federal anti-discrimination laws, according to a ruling that the Supreme Court let stand on Monday. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids job discrimination based on an individual's "national origin," race, sex or religion. But the U.S.

Jury selection began under tight security Monday for the trial of a man charged with shooting a young woman whose rape and slaying may have been a motive for the mail bomb killings of a lawyer and a judge. The courtroom was inspected by bomb-sniffing dogs, and metal detectors were in place outside the courtroom. Emmanuel Hammond, 24, of Marietta, Ga., is charged with murder, felony murder, kidnaping and armed robbery in the shotgun slaying of Julie Love, 27.