U.S. Scorns Bid to Drop Murder-for-Hire Case

An alleged hit man’s accusation that federal agents failed to stop a murder-for-hire even though they were privy to information identifying the intended target, is “breathtaking in its falseness and hypocrisy” and does not warrant dismissing the charges against the defendant, prosecutors argued Thursday.

In papers filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the U.S. attorney’s office rejected as “frivolous” the charges of Daniel Ray Bennett, who faces the death penalty for his alleged participation in a November 1996 murder-for-hire in Las Vegas that was linked to a nationwide heroin and cocaine conspiracy ring.

Bennett’s attorneys are seeking to have the case thrown out because of what they contended in legal papers last week was “outrageous conduct” by the federal agents. The lawyers argue that the government listened to about 30 wiretapped conversations in which the scheme and the intended target were described.

Prosecutors strongly denied that charge in their 14-page response.

According to prosecutors, Bennett, 27, and his alleged accomplice, Roy Lee Lovett Jr., 18, were hired by reputed South-Central Los Angeles drug dealer Edward Stanley to kill Rickey Ray Hall in retaliation for Hall’s alleged theft of $300,000.

Bennett chased Hall down a Las Vegas street Nov. 26, fatally shooting him three times, prosecutors said.

At one point weeks before the shooting, federal agents warned a man whom they erroneously suspected was the intended target. Prosecutors, however, said that the target was never mentioned by name in the phone conversations and that they only found out that the slaying had occurred when Bennett called Stanley to report it.

“The fact that government agents were unable to determine the identity of an unnamed target prior to an act of violence by defendant Bennett simply cannot be outrageous government conduct,” prosecutors said in their brief.

Defense attorneys say in their motion that the conversations revealed a number of clues, including the name of the victim’s girlfriend, the victim’s first name and descriptions of his car and home. Furthermore, they said the man federal agents warned was in jail at the time of the slaying.

Prosecutors responded that Lovett mentioned the victim’s first name “to someone in the background” of one conversation, not to Stanley, to whom he was speaking on the telephone.

“Only with the benefit of hindsight does that seem significant,” prosecutors said.

They added that “at the very time when the man that the government warned was in custody and certainly safe, defendant Bennett complained [in a wiretapped conversation] that he could not find him.”