March 01--More than eight years after the disappearance of 28-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative Nailah Franklin sparked widespread attention, the sentencing hearing for her killer -- a man she once casually dated -- began Monday with the defendant refusing to participate.
Dressed in jail scrubs and surrounded by four sheriff's deputies, Reginald Potts told Judge Thomas Gainer he would not participate in the hearing because it's being recorded by TV and print cameras and could take at least three days.
"Your honor, I do not wish to be under video at all. At all," said Potts, 38, who also asked that his family not be photographed.
But after Gainer told Potts -- who'd objected to the "circus" and "sensationalized" media coverage of the case -- he would not be able to advise his attorneys, Potts reconsidered and changed into a gray suit before the hearing began. He faces up to life in prison for the 2007 killing.
Prosecutors spent more than three hours Monday calling witnesses who detailed the self-admitted gang member's criminal history, starting with his days stealing high-end cars and delivering drugs while a college student at Northern Illinois and Southern Illinois universities.
After being arrested in 1996 in Atlanta in a stolen $92,000 Mercedes, Potts was able to steal the car again from a police impound lot by posing as a courier and leaving with the vehicle while a worker looked for paperwork, a former prosecutor testified.
Potts came across as a polished manipulator who turned combative and sometimes violent when his lies were uncovered or his wishes weren't fulfilled, according to testimony from police and correctional officers from across the state.
Franklin was slain in September 2007 after she left her Chicago condo and fell into a "deadly ambush" set by Potts, who had been stalking her for days, prosecutors said at trial. Potts was the last person seen with Franklin before she went missing. Just days before her disappearance, Franklin told Potts in an email that she had recently filed a police report and planned to obtain an order of protection against him.
After she vanished, Franklin's family distributed thousands of missing-person fliers as people searched for her. On the ninth day of the search, her badly decomposed, naked body was found in a wooded area near Calumet City, behind a vacant store owned by Potts' brother-in-law.
sschmadeke@tribpub.com
