AP News, January 11th, 2007
A jury deliberating a sentence in the retrial of a truck driver facing possible execution for his role in the nation's deadliest human smuggling attempt will take a five-day break, a judge announced Wednesday.
Jurors worked for about eight hours Wednesday without agreeing on a sentence for Tyrone Williams in the 2003 smuggling attempt, in which 19 illegal immigrants died after being locked in his sweltering trailer for hours.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal told attorneys that the jury decided to wait until Tuesday to resume deliberations because she was scheduled to be out of town Thursday and Friday, and also because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday.
Since Tuesday, the jury has deliberated for about 14 hours.
The jury is deciding whether to sentence Williams to death or life in prison without parole, or to let Rosenthal issue a sentence ranging from no incarceration to life in prison without parole.
Williams was convicted last month of 58 counts of conspiracy and harboring and transporting immigrants, including 20 counts that were eligible for the death penalty.
During the smuggling attempt from South Texas to Houston, more than 70 immigrants were packed inside Williams' airtight trailer. Williams abandoned the container when the immigrants began succumbing to the heat.
Defense attorney Craig Washington told the jury that Williams never meant for the immigrants to die. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Rodriguez said Williams deserves the death penalty because he refused to free the immigrants when he knew they were dying.
The trial was the second for Williams, a 35-year-old Jamaican citizen who lived in Schenectady, N.Y. An appeals court overturned a verdict against him in 2005 when a jury convicted him of 38 transporting counts but couldn't agree on his role in the smuggling attempt and deadlocked on the 20 other counts.
