Indiana resident shot, killed while visiting Minnesota\nST. PAUL, Minn. -- A man who was shot to death in St. Paul has been identified as an Indiana man.\nDesmond Tremaine Cooper, 23, of Gary, apparently was visiting people in the Twin Cities when he was shot several times in the upper body late Wednesday, police said Friday.\nHe was chased by a group of men from an apartment house and was shot behind the building, police said. Spokesman Paul Schnell said investigators had some ideas of the motive, but he didn't give details. It was not a random act of violence, he said.\nThere were no immediate arrests.\nInvestigators were hoping to speak to as many as eight men who were with Cooper and left the scene before police arrived.
Lawyers argue inmate not competent to waive appeal\nFORT WAYNE -- Attorneys for an inmate facing the death penalty for killing his brother and three other men in a Fort Wayne home say he is not mentally competent to waive further appeals.\nLawyers representing Joseph Corcoran argued Thursday before the Indiana Supreme Court in Indianapolis that he was mentally ill, including suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.\nPublic defender Joanna McFadden told the justices that Corcoran believed the Indiana Department of Correction was torturing him with an ultrasound machine that can read his thoughts and make him twitch.\n"This is so real to Joseph Corcoran that he would rather die than live with these delusions," she said.\nAttorneys for the state argued Corcoran wanted to die because he believed death was an appropriate punishment for intentionally killing four people in the 1997 attack. That is what he told Allen Superior Court Judge Fran Gull last year.\nGull found Corcoran competent after hearing testimony from multiple doctors, reviewing thousands of pages of evidence concerning his mental illness and personally questioning Corcoran in December.\nThe motivation behind Corcoran's desire to waive his appeals is key to the Supreme Court's decision.\n"The issue is whether his mental condition is such that it leads him to believe he is better off dead than alive," Justice Theodore Boehm said.\nIn May 1999, a jury from Porter County convicted Corcoran of four counts of murder and recommended he be executed.\nCorcoran was convicted in the shooting deaths of his 30-year-old brother, James Corcoran; Douglas A. Stillwell, 30; Robert Scott Turner, 32; and Timothy G. Bricker, 30. Turner was the fiance of Corcoran's sister.\nCorcoran said he shot the men with a semiautomatic rifle in the living room of the home he shared with his brother and sister because he overheard them talking about him.
Prison guard faces charges of distributing child pornography\nCARLISLE, Ind. -- A guard at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility has been charged with producing and distributing child pornography and sexually exploiting a minor on the Internet.\nCraig MacPherson, 39, of Carlisle, was arrested Wednesday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said they found a computer in MacPherson's basement that had about 100 images of minors having sex, according to a probable-cause affidavit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court.\nMacPherson was being held Sunday in the Marion County Jail.\nA detention hearing was scheduled for Tuesday in Indianapolis. A judge will decide if MacPherson will be jailed until trial, said Claudia Cummings, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.\nFederal agents said MacPherson admitted to digitally photographing a girl he knew was under 18 years old and distributing the pictures to others over the Internet, the probable cause affidavit said.\nAgents said he also admitted to having two girls under 18 have sex and distributed it on the Internet, the affidavit said.\nMacPherson, a prison guard at Wabash since 2001, told police he had been collecting both adult and child images from various sources on the Internet for five years, according to the affidavit.\nMacPherson is on emergency suspension without pay pending the outcome of the federal investigation, said Rich Larsen, spokesman with the Carlisle prison.
