The Edawn Coughman Case: A Hate Crime Hoax?

     In 2012, 23-year-old offensive tackle Edawn Coughman, out of Shaw University, a historically black Baptist liberal arts school in Raleigh, North Carolina, made the Seattle Seahawks practice squad. During the next four years, Coughman was signed by the Dallas Cowboys, Buffalo Bills, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Redskins without making the active rosters of any of these teams.

     In 2016, Edawn Coughman was out of football and living in Buford, Georgia. He started two businesses, Create and Bake Pizza and an ice cream shop called Coughman's Creamery in a shopping plaza on Duluth Highway in unincorporated Lawrenceville, a community 25 miles northeast of Atlanta.

     In 2019, Mr. Coughman, as a businessman, was struggling.

     At nine-thirty on the night of September 11, 2019, a maintenance worker at the Lawrenceville shopping plaza saw someone inside Create and Bake Pizza and Coughman's Creamery destroying the interiors of these establishments. The plaza worker called 911.

     When deputies with the Gwinett County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene, they saw a black man behind the wheel of a Chevrolet pickup truck without license plates. When officers pulled the truck over, they noticed several flat-screen television sets in the cab and truck bed.

     The driver of the pickup turned out to be Edawn Coughman. The television screens had mounting brackets with pieces of drywall attached. The sets had obviously been recently ripped from their places on walls.

     Inside Mr. Coughman's businesses, officers discovered, besides evidence that several television sets had been pulled off the walls, graffiti in still tacky black spray paint. The booth cushions in both establishments had also been so defaced. On the walls, the vandal had drawn swastikas and written the words "monkey," and "MAGA" (Make America Great Again) as well as the n-word.

     In Coughman's truck, officers found a crowbar believed to have been used to pry open the back doors to his businesses. Deputies also discovered several recently used black spray cans. The owner of the burglarized businesses was further incriminated by fresh stains of black paint on his hands.

     In the course of their investigation, officers learned that while Mr. Coughman did not report the burglary/hate crime to the police, he had filed a report with his insurance company. This suggested that Coughman had not only created a racial hate crime hoax, he had intended to defraud his insurance company.

     On September 12, 2019, a Gwinett County prosecutor charged Edawn Coughman with falsely reporting a burglary and insurance fraud. Shortly after being booked into the Gwinett County Jail on those charges, the 30-year-old posted his $8,300 bail and was released.

     Two weeks after his arrest, Edwan Coughman told a reporter with a local television station that "I had a good business going. I have nothing now. I'm innocent." Regarding being compared to Jussie Smollett, Coughman said, "I feel it's disrespectful." 

     If there has been a disposition of this case, it has not been reported on the Internet. 

Releasing Nonviolent Criminals from Prison

Some politicians and criminal justice practitioners are for releasing nonviolent criminals from prison. So, under this policy, who gets out? The handful of shoplifters who actually go to  prison would get out even though retail thieves put countless stores out of business. A single embezzler can send his or her company into bankruptcy. And what about the check forgers, counterfeiters, credit card swindlers, con artists, car thieves, home burglars, and smash and grab jewelry thieves? And don't forget witnesses who lie under oath, criminal voyeurs, and drug dealers who bribe cops? People intent on decriminalizing nonviolent crime should be reminded that nonviolent crime is not victimless crime. 

Writing True Crime

The tools I have used for my writing career have been my ability to interview people and get them to tell me the truth, and my abilities as an investigative reporter. I might spend weeks verifying some little fact that is just going to be great in my book--it's going to be a little spark. Fiction writers don't need to spend weeks looking for the little spark--they invent it. I write about real people, real Americans getting into trouble, getting out of it, going to the penitentiary, going to the electric chair, being murdered, being saved. And it's all true.

Margaret DiCanio in The 3rd Degree, October 1997 

The Impostor Syndrome

Feeling like a fraud or con artist can be a hazard of the writing profession; there's a fine line, Balzac wrote, between the artist and the criminal.

Adam Langer, The New York Times Book Review, January 19, 2014

The Bad Boy Romance Hero

I think there are several dynamics that attract us to bad boy heroes who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know--at least in novels and movies. They're hot, hunky, and irreverent. I think a lot of us have the fantasy of meeting a bad boy with snake-charmer eyes, a wicked smile, and a smooth tongue. We are caught up in the overwhelming desire for such a man and we just can't fight it.

Rachael Gibson, likebooks.com, 2005 

Murder by Breast Milk

     A judge sentenced a South Carolina woman to 20 years in prison on April 4, 2014 for killing her 6-week-old daughter with what prosecutors say was an overdose of morphine delivered through her breast milk. Stephanie Greene, 39, said nothing as the minimum sentence was handed down. A jury found the former nurse guilty of homicide by child abuse the day before. She could have faced up to life behind bars.

     Her lawyer said she will appeal and it's likely the case will be tied up for years to come. Both the prosecutor and Greene's lawyer agree no mother has ever been prosecuted in the United States for killing her child through a substance transmitted in breast milk. Greene's daughter was born healthy, but was found dead in her parents' bed just 46 days after she was born in November 2010.

     A toxicologist found a level of morphine in the baby's body that would have been lethal for an adult. With no needle marks on the child's body, authorities decided the drugs must have gotten into the infant through her mother's milk.

     A review of her medical records showed Greene carefully hid her pregnancy from her primary doctor. After a home pregnancy test showed she was pregnant, she told her primary doctor she needed to go to a gynecologist for birth control advice. She then got prenatal care from that doctor while not telling her all the painkillers she was taking. Greene also skipped appointments with her primary physician when it became obvious she was pregnant. She sent her husband to pick up her painkiller prescriptions.

     Greene spent more than 10 years racked with chronic pain after a car wreck before her unexpected pregnancy with her husband in 2010, defense attorney Rauch Wise said. Wise argued that prosecutors didn't prove how the baby got the morphine. According to Greene's attorney, there is little scientific evidence that enough morphine can gather in breast milk to kill an infant.

"Breast Feeding Death Sends Woman to Prison for 20 Years, Associated Press, April 4, 2015

The Professional Criminal

     Professional crime is primarily a money crime. This is its essential character. For the professional criminal--whether white, black or brown, immigrant or native-born, child of middle-class or of poverty--the motive force is business.

     Professional crime is not radical violence, sex crime, or violence for violence sake. The vicious beating of some old lady for the change in her handbag is not the quintessence of professional crime. Neither is the pointless assassination of random victims by a sniper on top of a university tower. These sorts of crime are the handiwork of amateurs, psychopaths, adventurers--not professional criminals.

     A great deal of crime in America is disorganized crime. It arises out of frustration, spur-of-the moment impulse, recklessness and, above all, thoughtlessness.

     By comparison, professional crime is organized crime; the acts are those of calculation, tradition and, occasionally, seasoned opportunism.

     The professional-criminal tradition in America dates back to Prohibition and extends profitably into the present. Along the road to riches professional criminals acquired a vast arsenal of profit-making techniques. They have improved, expanded and refined these techniques. From their perspective they have constantly sought to advance the state of their art. [The most clever professional criminals go into politics.]

Thomas Plate, Crime Pays, 1975

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The Golden Age of detective fiction occurred between the two world wars, when several crucial developments changed the genre forever. The stories became more literate and the detectives more believable--no longer were they persons of super human intellect who could look at someone's shoes and determine where they had just been by the type of dirt collected there. Also, much more emphasis was put on period and character as opposed to merely constructing a clever puzzle.

Jay Pearsal, Mystery and Crime, 1995

Tell a Story

The object of most of your writing is to tell a story, whether it's fictional or not. The story will have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in telling the story, you are moving the reader along, maintaining interest and attention from page to page. To facilitate this, the writer has at her disposal an array of devices--species of writing like narrative, exposition, dialogue, background. Each stage of the process has its own particular challenges.

Ian Jackman, The Writer's Mentor, 2004 

The Crack Addict

     Every street cop in America knows that crack cocaine is the most potent drug on earth. A high percentage of violent crimes in this country are perpetrated to get money to buy the drug.

     Crack cocaine, or freebase, is created by cooking powdered cocaine with baking soda. When cooled, the product is hammered into curly white flakes that resemble bits of shaved soap, or paint peelings. A flake is called a "rock."

     Addiction is swift, and the prospects for recovery are bleak. Smokable cocaine doesn't trickle into the brain--it overwhelms it. The high is an intense burst of pleasure. But the downside is a free fall into deep depression. Addicts say you rise through the ceiling, then crash back through the floor. The user, desperate to postpone the brutal collapse that follows when the dose wears off, quickly learns the strategy of obtaining, in one transaction, as many rocks as possible.

     But no matter how much you have, it's never enough. A terrifying cost comes with prolonged usage--a horrible craving that makes users go berserk. It creeps into the mind minutes after the last rock is smoked up. The addict must get more. So he picks up whatever weapon is available and goes shopping. And that's where law-abiding citizens all too often get sucked into a crackhead's world.

Robert A. Waters, The Best Defense, 1998