PRATTVILLE — Two Montgomery teenagers are charged with capital murder in connection with a May 2016 homicide in Prattville.
One of the teens was 14 at the time of the homicide, which makes him one of the youngest people in the state to be charged with capital murder.
Lil’ Roderick Williams, 16 and Devonte Raymon Hill, 17, were each indicted on capital murder charges by the Autauga County Grand Jury.
On May 21, 2016, John Michael Taylor, 57, of Prattville, was shot and killed. The capital murder charges were filed because prosecutors feel the murder was committed during the commission of a robbery, said Chief Assistant District Attorney C.J. Robinson.
Both Williams and Hill are being held without bond.
Taylor went to a convenience store in the 1900 block of Cobbs Ford Road in the early morning hours of May 21, previous testimony at preliminary hearings and court documents show. He was found by a passing motorist as he laid on Cobbs Ford Road. Taylor told the first-responding officers that three men forced him into a minivan, drove him behind the store, and shot him, Police Chief Mark Thompson said at the time. He walked back to Cobbs Ford Road after being shot, records show.
The teens’ co-defendant, Santwone Cornelius Jones, 24, also of Montgomery, was indicted on capital murder charges in the case in 2017. Jones is in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections on an unrelated robbery conviction, court records show.
Grand jury action involving Hill and Williams was delayed, because they were charged as adults. Williams was 14 and Hill was 15 at the time of the shooting. Autauga County District Judge Joy Booth adjudicated the teenagers as adults. Her ruling cleared both the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court on review, records show.
Williams is the youngest person to be charged with murder or capital murder in the 19th Judicial District, Robinson said, which includes Autauga, Elmore and Chilton counties. Under Alabama law, the minimum age a person can be charged as an adult is 14.
“That would have to make Hill one of the youngest in the state to be charged as an adult in a capital murder case,” Robinson said. “Just procedurally, there can’t be that many 14-year-olds charged as adults.”
Capital murder is the highest charge sought by the state. The only sentencing options upon conviction are the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that juveniles, people under the age of 18 when convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, cannot be executed. That leaves life without the possibility of parole as possible sentences for Williams and Hill. Even then, getting the sentences to pass court muster is iffy, Robinson admits.
“In dealing with juveniles and capital murder sentences, there are a few more hurdles, a few more court proceedings that you have to go through,” he said. “We felt in this case that Williams and Hill needed to face the same charges as Jones.”
The prosecution has not released who allegedly fired the shot that killed Taylor.
“That’s evidence that will come out at trial,” Robinson said. “But under Alabama’s accomplice law, they are all equally criminally culpable.”
Source: montgomeryadvertiser.com, Marty Roney, September 25, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde