Juvenile detention center staff allegedly acted with “reckless neglect” and “deliberate indifference” toward the teen, Billy Woods, who died by suicide in a regional juvenile detention center in 2016, according to a civil suit filed last month.
The defense attorney, an opponent of Kunzweiler’s in next month’s primary election, withdrew on Tuesday saying the sitting DA had “politicized the case.”
Fu, a private attorney, had represented Darius Padillow, who was charged in 2017 with shooting 10 shots at Tulsa police officers.
From 2013 to 2017, only 29 out of 137 prisoners— or 21 percent of medical parole cases that came before the governor and the state’s Pardon and Parole Board — were ultimately approved for release.
The last hour of the nearly three-hour debate featured various figures, including one of Betty Shelby’s attorneys, grilling incumbent DA Steve Kunzweiler about last summer’s trial.
“There are a lot of non-violent people who can have better outcomes through diversion, where prison actually creates a worse outcome in terms of recidivism,” Westcott said.
“In short, the evidence of identification disintegrated to the point that our collective decision was that we did not have enough credible evidence to make it past the ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard we would have at trial,” Payne County District Attorney Laura Thomas said.
“The FBI, they knew. They raided our house with gun drawn—they had no clue what they did to us,”
