Former Chief Magistrate Bryant Cochran and Angela Garmley. Garmley’s accusations against Cochran initiated a state investigation that led to the judge’s resignation.Bryant Cochran, the former Murray County, Ga., magistrate accused of planting drugs on a woman’s car in 2012, is still on track to spend time in prison.
U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy rejected a motion for a new trial from Cochran’s attorney, Page Pate, on Friday. Pate argued that Murphy should have allowed into the trial what Pate believed to be key evidence.
A jury convicted Cochran in December of six crimes, including violating three women’s constitutional rights, conspiring to plant methamphetamine on a woman’s car and asking a witness to lie on his behalf.
After his conviction, Cochran was supposed to appear in U.S. District Court on Feb. 20 for a sentencing hearing. But Pate filed his appeal. Murphy told his clerk Friday to schedule a new sentencing hearing.
Pate told Murphy that Cochran should get a new trial because Murphy didn’t let a witness share certain pieces of information. Cochran’s niece, Erika Sanford, was going to testify that a friend named Mike Winkler told Cochran that a woman in town drove with methamphetamine attached to the bottom of her car in a metal tin.
That woman was Angela Garmley, who spoke out against Cochran in the summer of 2012, telling media outlets that the magistrate asked her to have sex with him when she requested he take out warrants against her neighbors. The Murray County Sheriff’s Office later arrested her in August 2012, finding the drugs on the bottom of her car.
The charges against Garmley were dropped on suspicion that she had been framed. Federal prosecutors said Cochran told one of his tenants to plant the drugs on Garmley’s car before the magistrate called the sheriff’s office and tipped them off.
Cochran said he learned about Garmley’s drugs from Winkler, but Winkler testified that Cochran actually told him to lie to investigators on his behalf, claiming to be the source of that tip. Sanford planned to tell the jury that Winkler first gave her this tip, and she asked him to pass it along to Cochran.
After the trial, Sanford said her inability to testify cost her uncle the trial.
“Mr. Winkler told me that he had information that [Garmley] carried methamphetamine in a small magnetic box under her vehicle,” she later wrote in an affidavit.
During the trial, Murphy said the jury couldn’t hear Sanford’s testimony because it was hearsay. The jury heard Winkler’s version of events directly.
Plus, Cochran never took the stand.
“He did not testify that he received the tip or that it had any effect on his state of mind,” Murphy wrote in his order.
Cochran’s attorney also asked the judge to acquit Cochran on three charges because the prosecution didn’t show enough evidence at trial. Murphy rejected that argument, too.
According to court filings, no sentencing date has been set for Cochran.
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at tjett@timesfreepress.comor at 423-757-6476.
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