Woman convicted in murder conspiracy calls judge 'racist,' gets life sentence
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A woman convicted in the 2015 murder-for-hire of an informant in a drug case against her and her boyfriend accused the judge that oversaw her trial of being racist.
Shelia McFarland ignored repeated pleas from her lawyers to stay quiet and interrupted Common Pleas Judge Daniel Gaul several times to dispute facts of her case, to call him "a racist" and to say that she had "people looking into" her case.
"You have always been disrespectful to me, and you don't like black people and you definitely don't like me," McFarland told Gaul Wednesday.
Gaul, who is white, told McFarland, who is black, that she played "the race card" to avoid blame for her role in the killing. The judge stood up from his bench, unzipped his robe and told McFarland that he wanted to impose a sentence that would "resonate across the state of Ohio and across this country."
Read more: http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/02/woman_convicted_in_murder_cons.html
