Stabbing Raises Court Security Fears

Christina Fleming decided to spend Monday morning with a class of fifth-graders while jurors at the Compton courthouse deliberated the fate of the man she had prosecuted on a sexual kidnapping charge, James Eugene Moore.

Her decision may have saved her life.

As Fleming helped the children enact a mock trial, Compton jurors announced a guilty verdict, sending Moore into a rage. Wielding a nonmetallic knife he had smuggled past security, Moore turned on the courtroom’s bailiffs, puncturing one deputy’s lung and attacking the throat of another before he was shot and killed.

Etched along the 7 1/2-inch blade were the words: “For Christina Fleming.”

When Fleming returned to court, she learned that Moore’s attack had left two deputies hospitalized.

“I was pretty shocked, stunned,” the deputy district attorney said. “It was eerie that he was carving onto the knife my full name. It emphasized just how long the knife was. I have a lot of letters in my name.”

As the deputies recovered from their injuries and authorities discussed tightening security, investigators pieced together the events that led to the deadly finale--which Moore had carefully scripted.

From all indications, Moore had determined that if found guilty, he would not leave court alive.

Moore, a former cabdriver, was on trial for molesting a 19-year-old mentally retarded woman he had picked up as a fare in north Long Beach in July. He had been freed from jail on his own recognizance, a decision that was not unusual given the circumstances, said his lawyer, Bobby Black.

At 51, Moore had no known sexual or violent criminal record, police said. Having had only minor brushes with the law in the last decade, he had been allowed to live in his mobile home and go to court unattended.

Friends said they were astonished when Moore was arrested. He was a strict but loving father, they said, who lived for his three daughters and his inventions. He was adamant that he was innocent and appeared confident that the jury would believe him. But Moore clearly harbored doubts.

The victim’s testimony had been harrowing, said one of Moore’s friends who had attended the trial. The victim testified that Moore had molested her three separate times in the back of his cab, despite her telling him repeatedly, “Take me home. I want my mom.”

Having been found guilty, Moore faced a life sentence, with the possibility of parole after seven years.

Just days before the verdict, Moore had hinted of his deep aversion to the idea of prison. When one of Moore’s friends, Alverta Bradford, met him last Saturday, she said he got upset when they talked about the trial. He told her he could not live in prison.

“I guess he was trying to tell me that if he was found guilty he didn’t want to live,” she said.

Fleming said Moore glared at her for much of the trial, making her feel more uncomfortable than during any trial in her seven years as a prosecutor. “I never had a defendant personalize their case to this degree, to where I’ve felt it,” she said.

On Monday morning, Moore apparently slipped through the Compton courthouse’s metal detectors and past an X-ray machine with the homemade knife undetected. Police still do not know whether he carried the knife under his clothes or hid it in his briefcase.

He took the elevator to the 11th floor, where one witness saw him polishing or scratching at something, police said. It may have been the knife or one of the inventions that he continually tried to hawk.

Along with the knife, Moore brought to court one of his favorite creations, a toothpaste caddy that held brushes and floss and helped squeeze the last bit of stubborn paste from a tube. As he waited inside the courtroom to hear his fate, Moore showed one of the security guards how the caddy worked, his lawyer said.

There was nothing in the courtroom that morning that tipped off people about what was to unfold.

As the clerk read the verdict, Moore became upset. He shouted, “You’ve just given me a death sentence for something that I didn’t do!” Bailiffs tried to handcuff him, but Moore stabbed one deputy, piercing her under an armpit.

As Moore attacked a second deputy, a third unsuccessfully tried to disarm him. The deputy repeatedly ordered Moore to drop the knife before shooting him in the head, police said.

On Moore’s body, sheriff’s investigators found a note explaining the savage attack. One detective who examined the note paraphrased its contents: If you are reading this, the note said, I am probably dead because I refuse to go to prison for something I did not do.

“He wanted the world to know just how strongly he believed he wasn’t guilty,” said Lt. Ray Peavy of the sheriff’s homicide bureau. “It was preordained in his mind that this was going to happen. And it did. It’s kind of eerie.”

Moore’s attack inside the courtroom has concerned lawyers and judges at Compton court, especially about the security of prosecutors.

“As a prosecutor, you’ve got to be worried about this case. I think it’s a good reminder for us,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Henry Kerner, who works at the Compton courthouse.

“I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that the people who commit the kind of crimes we try are transformed into apostles when they come here.”

Since the incident, some judges have raised the issue of tightening security at the Compton courthouse.

Defendants who are in custody during trials are routinely searched before entering court, but out-of-custody defendants, like Moore, are not. At a meeting with security chiefs after Moore’s death, Compton judges raised the possibility of patting down out-of-custody defendants as they approach the defendant’s table.

But such practices often are deemed an unwelcome interruption of court proceedings by lawyers and judges, said Sgt. Robert McLin, who heads security at the Compton courthouse. Defense attorneys are the most resistant, arguing that searching a defendant in front of jurors can give the appearance of guilt, he said.