Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. is charged with two different murders — and when evidence is presented in his trial for the March 2008 murder of former student body president Eve Carson, jurors could find out about both.
Judge Allen Baddour ruled Monday afternoon during the first steps of the Lovette trial that information from the Abhijit Mahato murder in Durham isn’t too prejudicial and is similar enough to evidence from the Carson case to be shown to the jury, which will be selected starting Tuesday.
Mahato was a 29-year-old Duke University graduate student who was found shot once in the head in his off-campus apartment in January 2008. Lovette and Stephen Lavance Oates have been charged in the shooting.
Lovette’s defense attorney, Karen Bethea-Shields, had requested that testimonies related to charges outside of the Carson case be ruled out as too prejudicial or as not substantially similar.
Bethea-Shields said witnesses the prosecution has testimony from in relation to the Mahato murder are of questionable reliability and could sway the jury.
“Every last one of these witnesses has a threshold problem,” she said during the motion hearing, saying that some witnesses had contradicted their statements at various times since making them, and other made statements under stress or promise of lighter sentences.
But Jim Woodall, district attorney for Orange County, said both Carson’s and Mahato’s murders involved college students shot off-campus for the apparent motive of monetary gain.
Carson was found shot five times in an intersection about a mile off campus. Prosecutors say Lovette and Demario James Atwater, who has already been convicted, abducted Carson from her apartment, drove her in her SUV to withdraw cash from her bank account and then killed her.
In both cases, money was withdrawn from the victim’s ATM and the victims’ cellphones, iPods and other possessions were stolen, Woodall said.
