Court rejects Harvey's appeal
KNOXVILLE — A state appeals court here rejected an appeal by Charles Ray Harvey to have his murder conviction overturned.
Harvey, who was convicted in August 2005 of murdering his son-in-law, Armando G. Loredo, in 2003, is currently serving a life prison sentence.
In a 17-page opinion issued Tuesday (March 4), the Criminal Appeals Court at Knoxville upheld an earlier decision by local Criminal Court Judge Shayne Sexton to reject Harvey’s appeal for a new trial.
Presiding Judge Joseph M. Tipton delivered the opinion of the court, and was joined by Thomas T. Woodall and D. Kelly Thomas. The court had heard Harvey’s appeal in July 2007.
A jury of nine men and three women deliberated less than three hours before convicting Harvey of first degree murder in his son-in-law’s death in July 2005, two years after fishermen discovered Loredo’s body weighted and submerged in New River a short distance upstream of the U.S. Hwy. 27 bridge.
Harvey’s daughter, Vanessa Loredo, pled guilty to a lesser charge for her involvement in her husband’s death.
The state, and Loredo, who testified against her father, contended at the trial and later in appeal that it was Harvey who killed Loredo with a 9mm Beretta handgun while the three were on an overnight camping trip along the river. Harvey, however, argued that it was his daughter who pulled the trigger and killed her husband.
At an appeal eight months after the 2005 guilty verdict was returned, Harvey’s attorneys argued before Judge Sexton that Harvey should receive a new trial based on, among other things, letters that had been written by Vanessa Loredo from prison after the original court proceeding had taken place.
In the letters — which had been written from Loredo to a pen pal who was in custody at the same facility, Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, as her father — Harvey alleged that Loredo had admitted to killing her husband.
At the March 2006 hearing on Harvey’s appeal, Loredo admitted having written the letters in question but denied penning the statements that appeared to bring her involvement in the killing into play.
Those statements, which included such excerpts as “that is why I killed him” and “it had to be done, that is why I killed my husband,” were denied by Loredo, who pointed out several handwriting inconsistencies between the statements in question and the rest of the letters. Loredo also claimed that some of the statements were written below the bottom margin or above the top margin of the notebook paper pages on which the letters were written.
In the end, Judge Sexton ruled that the letters were not credible and refused Harvey’s request for a new trial, leading Harvey’s defense team — which includes Murfreesboro attorneys John G. Mitchell, Jr., Edward L. Holt, Jr., and Darwin K. Colston — to appeal the decision before the state court of criminal appeals.
In the appeal, Harvey’s attorneys argued that a July 2003 search of the Simms Road, Robbins, property that he rented — a search which uncovered the weapon authorities said was used to kill Loredo — was unlawful. Harvey argued that his live-in girlfriend, Donna G. LaBoy, who had given detectives consent to search the property, was not authorized to provide such consent. Defense counsel also argued that the local criminal court had erred in denying Harvey’s motion for new trial based upon the letters allegedly written by Loredo. Additionally, they argued, the court erred in allowing the state to enter into evidence two letters allegedly written from Harvey to his sisters.
In those letters, written after Harvey was taken into custody by local authorities, Harvey allegedly sought $8,000 to hire a “hit man” to kill LaBoy, for cooperating with authorities in the investigation of Loredo’s death, and his daughter. In a sidebar, off-the-record conference early in the trial, Judge Sexton had ruled that the letters could not be entered as evidence, but had warned that he might later permit them, depending upon how the trial progressed. Following a consultation with attorneys towards the end of the state’s case, Sexton reversed his earlier decision.
The appeals court rejected all three arguments, and affirmed the judgment of the trial court in full.
Harvey was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for Loredo’s death. Both Harvey and Vanessa Loredo painted a picture of an abusive husband with their testimony, though they differed on who actually killed Loredo. Vanessa Loredo testified that she went to the river on July 8, 2003, knowing that her father intended to kill her husband, while Harvey testified that his daughter had taken his handgun without his knowledge and that it was she who had killed her husband, as the two fought during the camping trip.
Two days after Harvey’s conviction, Vanessa Loredo pled guilty to facilitation of second degree murder for her role in her husband’s death. She was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment, and will be eligible for parole next year.