Former death row inmate Isaiah McCoy is facing sex trafficking charges involving six more women.
A federal grand jury
returned an indictment Thursday charging McCoy, 28, with seven counts of
sex trafficking by force, threats, fraud or coercion between April 1 and Dec. 26. Each count involves a different adult female and carries a penalty of 15 years to life in prison.
The same grand jury
returned an earlier, superseded indictment charging McCoy and his Schofield Barracks soldier wife, Tawana Roberts, with trafficking one adult female. Roberts, 35, is not charged with the six additional sex trafficking charges.
At his bail hearing for the first indictment involving just one victim, the federal prosecutor said there were two other victims who had spoken to police.
McCoy and Roberts remain in custody without the opportunity for release pending trial in April.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kenneth J. Mansfield replaced McCoy’s federal public defender Friday with a court-appointed lawyer after McCoy told the court that he wanted to represent himself because of threats. McCoy divulged the alleged threats during a closed hearing and Mansfield didn’t go into detail about what McCoy told him.
The court-appointed lawyer, Gary Singh, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard L. Puglisi on Monday that
McCoy still wants to represent himself. Puglisi has set a Friday hearing to consider McCoy’s request.
Honolulu police say they arrested McCoy in a prostitution sting operation that resulted in the federal charges against him and his wife while investigating the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old Kaneohe man outside a Kuhio Avenue nightclub on Sept. 16. McCoy’s 18-year-old protege Jordan A. Smith is awaiting trial in state court on murder, attempted murder and firearm charges.
McCoy was sentenced to death in 2012 after a Delaware jury found him guilty of a drug-related murder. The Delaware Supreme Court overturned the conviction and sentence and McCoy was acquitted in the retrial.
