Inside
Fort Smith
officer justified
in shooting man,
prosecutor rules.
PAGE 2B
ARKANSAS
B
Copyright © 2013, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.
ARKANSAS ONLINE www.arkansasonline.com
Divorce
contests
Mann’s
income
TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2013
Arson cases in Dyess
spark security boost
Pedestrian safety campaign
KENNETH HEARD
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Lawyer: Victim,
ex-spouse split it
LINDA SATTER
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Arkansas law concerning the division of marital
property — or all property
acquired by either spouse
subsequent to the marriage
— is well-established and
prevents the federal government from taking all of
Randeep Mann’s benefits
from a disability-insurance
policy to apply to his restitution in a criminal case,
his wife’s attorney argued
Monday.
Mann, 58, a former Russellville physician, is serving
a life sentence for orchestrating a February 2009 grenade attack in West Memphis that severely injured
the chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board.
Mann’s wife, Sangeeta
“Sue” Mann, who is serving
a one-year
sentence for
interfering
in the federal investigation of her
husband, is
seeking a
divorce. Her
attorney, Jeff
S. Mann
Rosenzweig,
asserted in a court filing
that she is entitled to half of
the $413, 259 he has received
through the policy and half
of any future payments.
Rosenzweig was responding to a motion that
federal prosecutors filed
April 2 seeking those
proceeds and any future
disability payments that
Mann receives monthly for
advanced osteoarthritis in
his left shoulder. The prosecutors contend that the
funds should be applied to
the $1,105,281 in restitution
he owes Dr. Trent Pierce,
the victim, and three insurance companies that paid
Pierce’s medical bills after
the explosion.
Randeep Mann is
scheduled for a resentencing hearing Wednesday at
the order of the 8th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals,
which said the trial judge,
U.S. District Judge Brian
S. Miller, improperly calculated his penalty range.
The resentencing could result in Mann’s life sentence
being changed to a term of
years, but it isn’t expected
to affect restitution.
On the restitution question, Rosenzweig said that
despite legal justifications
cited by prosecutors seeking all the money from the
disability policy to apply to
the restitution, “The government’s theory is based
on inapposite cases and a
misreading of the applicable law and mistakenly mixes substantive rights and
procedural avenues.”
See MANN, Page 2B
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON
Norm Berner (left), head of the Little Rock Parks and Recreation
Department’s Park Ranger program, talks with Stan Dimitrov, chairman of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership Pedestrian Safety
Awareness Campaign, in front of pedestrian figures after an event
at West Capitol Avenue and Broadway in Little Rock on Monday.
JOHN LYNCH
A Pulaski County circuit
judge on Monday ordered
authorities to return $28,630
seized during a homicide investigation to the 37-year-old
North Little Rock man it was
taken from.
After a 45-minute hearing, Judge Mackie Pierce
sided with defense attorney
Patrick Benca, who argued
that sheriff’s deputies had no
grounds to take the money
from Anthony Tyrone Davis during a June 2011 traffic
stop.
According to testimony
and court records, Davis,
Herman Jefferson and Jonathan Wright were under
surveillance as part of an
investigation into the April
2011 slaying of David Tidwell, who was shot dead at
Four recent house fires
in Johnny Cash’s boyhood
town of Dyess have driven
local authorities to increase
patrols of the small Mississippi County town and have
spurred Arkansas State University officials to closely
watch their renovation project at the country singer’s
childhood home.
Authorities suspect arson
could be the cause of at least
three of the fires.
Three of the houses that
were detroyed by fire in the
past several months were vacant and had no electricity,
said Capt. Robb Rounsavall
of the Mississippi County
sheriff ’s office. The fourth
fire was in a vacant home
that was undergoing renovations, he said.
The fire in the renovated
home may have been caused
by lightning, he said. Three
of the four homes were not
insured, he said.
“It doesn’t make sense to
burn vacant houses,” Rounsavall said.
Authorities reported the
first fire on Oak Street in
Dyess at 1:30 a.m. on Feb.
24. Several people told investigators they heard an
explosion and saw the house
in flames as a red Ford Mustang was driving away from
the residence.
A second house burned on
Mississippi County Road 139
at 9:40 p.m. on March 5.
A third fire was reported
at 6:36 p.m. April 22 at the intersection of Arkansas 77 and
West County Road 956. Two
days later, a fourth fire gutted
a vacant home on Arkansas
14 in Dyess at 2:10 a.m.
On Monday, the state fire
marshal and members of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
inspected the fire scenes,
Rounsavall said. Teams also
used scent-detecting dogs to
determine if any accelerants
were used to ignite the fires.
See DYESS, Page 8B
Arts grant to UA
supports project
for urban design
Fire destroys 12-unit apartment
Students to work on plan
for studios, public venue
TRACIE DUNGAN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BENJAMIN KRAIN
Scan the photo or go to
arkansasonline.com/videos
Alfonso Guiterrez, who lives in Town Oaks Village with four roommates,
walks through the rubble of his upper-floor apartment Monday after a fire
destroyed the 12-unit building. Little Rock Fire Department crews were
called to the complex on Southedge Drive about 4:30 a.m. Monday, arriving to flames shooting from the roof.
The University of Arkansas’ Community Design Center and architecture students
will create an urban-design
plan for an arts district
in downtown Fayetteville
during the coming school
year, the center’s director
said Monday.
The center received a
$30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts to support the work on
the plan, which the center
staff and fifth-year architecture students from the Fayetteville campus will begin
this fall, director Stephen
Luoni said.
The design plan will propose two main things. The
first is the transformation of
the parking lot west of the
Walton Arts Center, at the
corner of Dickson Street and
West Avenue, into a development that would mix artists’
housing and studio space
with commercial space and
a “pocket park,” Luoni said
Monday.
The second involves the
design of a new “streetscape”
for West Avenue that would
create a public venue for festivals and other gatherings,
similar to the use of Fayetteville Square downtown, he
said.
“Right now, it’s just built
like a traffic throughput, so it
feels like a traffic corridor,”
Luoni said of West Avenue.
The plan may go for an
“urban room” design that
feels more enclosed, he said,
so that it could accommodate
foot traffic, limited vehicle
traffic and public gatherings.
The artists’ housing and
work spaces would be flexible so that an artist could live
adjacent to or over a studio,
the latter of which could be
open to the public or closed,
depending on the tenant, Luoni said. The housing flexibility also might mean that
people in professions other
than art might live and work
there.
In fact, “lofts” built to accommodate either an apartment or small shop are the
latest trend in urban housing around the country, he
said.
“People want to live
downtown, and they want
a lot of open spaces with
nice light,” Luoni said. That
includes baby boomers retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day
around the country, as well
as the 80 percent of college
graduates moving to cities
these days, he said.
“So all the housing trends
point to urban housing. You
see that happening in Fayetteville already with the
multifamily housing coming
up in downtown.”
See GRANT, Page 8B
Judges uphold death penalty in murder of Tilly family
LINDA SATTER
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Although there is no dispute that defense attorneys
engaged in racial discrimination when selecting a mostly
black jury to hear a federal murder case against two
Give back $28,630 taken
at traffic stop, judge says
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
v
his Slinker Road home south
of Sweet Home.
The 37-year-old Tidwell
was a drug dealer who had
testified for federal prosecutors four years earlier in
the the trial of Vertis Clay,
who was convicted in 2007
for participating in the 2003
torture and murder of Darryl
Johnson, a 38-year-old Pine
Bluff man who was part of a
ring that distributed marijuana shipments from Mexico.
Clay, 44, of North Little Rock,
was sentenced to life in prison after jurors rejected the
death penalty.
Court filings show that
Tidwell’s testimony was also used in the sentencing
of two other men: Calvin
Stovall was sentenced to life
in prison in 2008 on federal marijuana-trafficking
See TAKEN, Page 3B
white supremacists in 1999,
neither defendant has shown
he was prejudiced as a result,
a federal appeals court said
Monday in upholding the
conviction and death sentence of Danny Lee of Yukon,
Okla.
In rejecting Lee’s latest petition for a new trial, a threejudge panel of the 8th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in
St. Louis used similar reasoning as that used by another
three-judge panel last week in
rejecting co-defendant Chevy
Kehoe’s similar petition.
Lee, 40, is on death row
in a federal facility in Terre
Haute, Ind., while Kehoe,
40, is serving a life sentence
without the possibility of
parole at a federal prison in
Virginia.
Both men were convicted
in a 1999 jury trial in Little
Rock of racketeering and
three counts of murder in
aid of racketeering in connection with their cross-country
crime spree, which spanned
See PENALTY, Page 8B
Judge sets
child-abuse
trial’s rules
Chef competition
JOHN LYNCH
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON
Judges and observers watch as chef Brian Henson serves up his prosciutto-wrapped rabbit during
the regional chef-of-the-year competition Monday at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little
Rock. The competition continues through Wednesday.
A j u r y a t t h e co m ing child-abuse trial of a
35-year-old Little Rock man
can hear the child’s mother
testify that the defendant
once talked about hiding the
boy’s body if he died, Pulaski County Circuit Judge
Herb Wright ruled Monday.
But the judge said he
would not allow testimony
from Ronnie Lee Canada’s
former girlfriend about how
he broke their 3-month-old
daughter’s arm in Louisiana and from his ex-wife in
Texas that he had kicked,
punched and slapped the
couple’s 5-year-old adopted
daughter.
See TRIAL, Page 3B