8 years later, accused man pleads guilty
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8 years later, accused man pleads guilty

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8 years later, accused man pleads guilty

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State prosecutors’ eight-year effort to convict a young man in the 2016 murder of 15-year-old Brandon Wingo ended with a plea deal this week.

Diamonte Taylor, 26, pleaded guilty Tuesday to second-degree murder and first-degree conspiracy in Wingo’s killing, a slaying that shocked the city and that prosecutors say contributed to a deadly retaliatory war among local youths that led to the killings of several young men and the life imprisonment of others.

Taylor was first arrested for the crime in 2016 and since then the case has progressed through a vacated conviction, a mistrial and multiple defense motions to dismiss the case entirely.

In 2020, Taylor was sentenced to life in prison for the killing after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder. However, courts later ruled that the case rested in part on a minefield of unconstitutional police work. His conviction was overturned in 2021 by the Supreme Court, citing an unconstitutional search warrant filed by Wilmington police.

The judge then dismissed his second trial in December 2023 after a state gang investigator called by prosecutors testified that he had interrogated Taylor in his previous job in prisons and done so in a way that the defense said violated Taylor’s constitutional rights.

So he went from being sentenced to spending the rest of his life in prison to now: Prosecutors have accepted a plea deal in which they will recommend that he spend 15 years, the minimum sentence for the plea, behind bars. He has already been in prison for eight years, awaiting the conclusion of the case.

A Justice Department spokesman said Taylor admitted to killing Wingo as part of his plea. Ben Gifford, who has argued the case intensively on Taylor’s behalf since 2016, declined to comment, citing the upcoming sentencing hearing.

The Murder of Brandon Wingo

Wingo’s murder is one of the most significant in recent Wilmington history.

A student at Howard High School of Technology, Wingo was shot in the head as he walked home from school along Clifford Brown Walk on a sunny afternoon. His age and the brazen nature of the killing shocked the city. And for years, his name was plastered on city walls and streets, in social media posts and in prosecutors’ evidence against a series of young men they accused of being part of a gang war.

Prosecutors said his death was part of a feud between rival gangs, largely made up of teenagers, in Wilmington — a war that prosecutors said was the motive for several shootings and robberies in the city and was fueled by taunts and boasts on social media.

Taylor was also charged with participating in a crime within the Shoot to Kill gang, whose rivalry with the Only My Brothers group has been cited by police in several youth murders. In July, a man was sentenced to decades in prison for the murder of 15-year-old Jordan Ellerbe.

RECENT: Man convicted of 2015 murder of Wilmington teen, killing that police say sparked gang war

Prosecutors said the killings of Ellerbe and Wingo were among the first homicides in a series of shootings between the teens in Shoot to Kill and Only My Brothers.

Evidence in the Diamonte Taylor case

In 2018, prosecutors spent two weeks presenting evidence pointing to Taylor as Wingo’s killer.

The most damning testimony came from Kevon Harris-Dickerson, who told the jury that he was part of the Shoot to Kill gang with Taylor and that Taylor and another teenager planned the murder after Wingo disrespected a dead friend on Facebook. He also told the jury that he drove Taylor to the scene of the murder, drove him back later, and fled with him to North Carolina afterward.

Harris-Dickerson was charged with first-degree murder, gang involvement and several other crimes in 2016. But he pleaded guilty, agreed to cooperate with police and was sentenced to eight years in prison years ago.

Gifford, Taylor’s defense attorney, told the jury at the time that Harris-Dickerson was lying so prosecutors would get a favorable deal in her case and could not be trusted.

But prosecutors were able to support their case to the jury with data from Taylor’s phone, calling it a confession.

What happened back then?:Two people sentenced for the murder of 15-year-old Brandon Wingo

They showed the jury photos of Taylor holding what they believed to be the murder weapon and text messages in which he bragged about another shooting and referred to Wingo’s killing. They also showed him Googling a DelawareOnline.com news article about the killing.

“Diamonte Taylor confessed on his own cell phone to killing Brandon Wingo when he said, ‘I just killed,’ an ‘N’ word, as he took photo after photo of himself holding the murder weapon,” Assistant Attorney General Mark Denney said in his closing statements to the jury at the 2018 trial.

Police Minefield:

This evidence was instrumental in Taylor’s conviction by the jury and the life sentence handed down by Judge Vivian Medinilla in January 2020. However, the police work that provided this evidence would ultimately be the case’s undoing.

In September 2020, the Delaware Supreme Court ordered the conviction overturned because Wilmington police used an unconstitutional “general” warrant to search Taylor’s cellphone for evidence in the case.

When detectives seek to search a person’s phone, they describe their reason, the specific material sought and the scope of the search in a written affidavit, which a local magistrate judge reviews and approves.

Overthrown:Delaware Supreme Court overturns conviction in shooting death of Brandon Wingo

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from unreasonable government searches and requires authorities to describe “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” accurately.

How this applies to the ever-changing world of smartphone data is a question that continues to evolve through court decisions.

During the investigation, a Wilmington police detective obtained permission to search “all stored data” without limits on scope or duration on the devices confiscated from Taylor and ultimately extracted more than 17,000 data files from the phone, according to the Supreme Court ruling. That ruling was overly broad, the court ruled.

Before the trial, Gifford had unsuccessfully argued to Medinilla, the judge in the case, that the evidence should be thrown out.

Why was Diamote Taylor’s retrial canceled?

It would appear, and the defense argued, that the Supreme Court ruling required Taylor to be retried without the unconstitutionally obtained cellphone evidence. However, over the defense’s objections, Medinilla allowed police to draft another search warrant to collect evidence they knew existed on Taylor’s phone and he was retried in December 2023.

Prosecutors were in their second day of trial when Medinilla interrupted the trial, declaring a mistrial at the request of defense attorneys. The controversy centered around the testimony of Daniel Masi, a gang expert with the Delaware Department of Justice.

Null trial: Why a judge declared a mistrial in Brandon Wingo’s second murder trial

Prosecutors called him to the stand on the first day of the trial to provide expert testimony regarding evidence derived from alleged gang social media posts. Gifford questioned Masi in front of the jury about the source of his gang expertise, going back to Masi’s time as an investigator with the Delaware Department of Corrections before starting his current job with the state’s attorney’s office in 2018.

After reviewing Masi’s prior interview with Taylor, Gifford requested a new trial, arguing that the testimony left the jury no choice but to assume that Taylor endorsed Masi’s incriminating interpretations of the gang’s social media posts, as well as Taylor’s involvement in the gang.

Gifford also raised constitutional issues about his client being questioned without a lawyer and without the required warnings that his comments could be used against him.

Pressure for advocacy

Following the mistrial, the court eventually set another trial date for this fall, and defense attorneys renewed their efforts to have the case dismissed entirely and for the judge to suppress the cellphone evidence that led to the overturned verdict in the first trial.

Two such motions were renewed in July.

Gifford, the defense attorney, wrote that the Supreme Court’s mandate that overturned the first trial required that cellphone evidence not be used. In his motion, he wrote that allowing police to use an unconstitutional search warrant to search a person’s phone, and then craft a new search warrant specific to the evidence they want to use, would overturn people’s protections against unconstitutional searches.

He also separately asked that the case be dismissed under the court’s expedited trial rules. As of Wednesday, Taylor will have spent 3,016 days in jail, or more than eight years, waiting for the case to go to trial. Gifford argued that state Supreme Court rules require murder cases to be tried or adjudicated within a year of indictment.

The motion then attributes the five-year delay to factors dictated by the prosecution or the courts, arguing that Taylor’s right to a fair trial is prejudiced by the delay and that he has spent time unjustly locked up while presumed innocent.

It was in the context of those motions that the state accepted the plea deal. Taylor is scheduled to be sentenced later this year. Judges typically follow prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations in such cases, but Medinilla will have some latitude to apply a different sentence.

Website https://www.oneroofptbo.ca

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