KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Following a bitter rant against the court system, his accusers and the world in which he came to manhood, a Memphis man was sentenced Thursday to a 132-year prison term for murdering two brothers in a busted Knoxville drug deal.
"Don't just try to make me a monster in this courtroom!" James Edward Allen declared in a lengthy speech before Knox County Criminal Court Judge Steve Sword.
Noting the violence of his crimes and his long criminal record, Sword sentenced the career criminal to consecutive life sentences in the state prison system for killing Christian Haley, 20, and Joshua Haley, 19, in December 2019. That's a guaranteed 51 years for each killing, or 102 years for the 36-year-old.
The judge added 30 more years for other convictions that included the aggravated assault of Christian Haley's then pregnant girlfriend. After Christian Haley's murder, she's raising their child herself.
Sword told Allen the crimes he committed amounted to a psychopathic slaughter
Allen recruited several other younger men, including two juveniles, to help him pull off what was supposed to be a drug ripoff of the brothers at a Rocky Top Apartments unit near Interstate 640. Allen and a young co-defendant walked into a "powder keg" of a situation that night, and then they struck a match, said Sword, who presided over the trial.
One brother ended up shot eight times and the other ended up shot five times. Allen also threatened Christian Haley's girlfriend when she stepped out to see what was going on.
Allen and co-defendant Anthony Lua fled the apartment on foot and were caught by Knoxville police nearby. Their getaway driver drove off.
Jurors convicted Allen this summer.
Cuffed at the hands and feet, Allen became irate when the Haley brothers' mother Audrey Johnson Black began telling the judge via TEAMS about the loss she'd suffered. He cursed repeatedly and declared he wouldn't listen to her and didn't want to be there. He talked over her as she spoke.
Defense attorney Gerald Gulley suggested Allen could step out of the room while Black spoke. Sword declined to allow it, and when Allen continued to swear and complain, the judge warned him he was ready to gag him.
"You can gag me?" Allen said.
"I've given you two warnings. I won't give you another," Sword replied.
Allen fell silent as Black castigated him for being a coward with a "sad little, miserable life" who tried to get juveniles to do his dirty work. He tore her family apart, Black said.
Black said she wished Allen could be forced to sit in a hole "all day" while he's in prison.
"Now you get to sit behind bars for the rest of your rotten life," she declared.
"You deserve to rot."
Prosecutor Cameron Williams urged Sword to give Allen the maximum time he could possibly impose, all strung together one term after the other.
Gulley, who did not represent Allen at trial and just recently was appointed to the case, urged Sword to refrain from imposing maximum terms and to impose sentences that could be served at the same time rather than stretched out for decades. His client wasn't the actual trigger man, he argued.
When it was Allen's time to speak, flanked by court officers, he went on a non-stop diatribe, complaining about misjustice in the courtroom and in his life in general. He said he'd been abused as a child and had mental health problems.
He said he grew up in foster care, or with no care at all, in the Memphis area. He said he was falsely accused of being a killer when no one testified that he fired a weapon at the brothers.
Allen went on so long Sword told him he'd give him five more minutes to speak.
"I'm going to beat this on appeal," the inmate said.
