Nichols was being retried on charges that he held his fiancee hostage in her home and raped her last August. A first trial ended in a hung jury last week.
The defendant was being held without bond in the case, in which he was charged with rape, false imprisonment, aggravated sodomy, burglary, aggravated assault with intent to rape and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He reportedly faced the prospect of a life sentence if convicted.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes speaks during a hearing on Feb. 6, 2005.
(AP File Photo)
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Although Nichols was being held in custody during the retrial, he was not manacled and was allowed to dress in regular clothes to avoid prejudicing the jury against him, attorneys said.
Nonetheless, Evelyn Parker, a court reporter who was a close friend of Brandau, said, "There were concerns that he wasn't going to take [a guilty verdict] lying down."
Jurors said Nichols had a tendency to glare at them during the proceedings, which started Tuesday. The defendant had yet to take the stand in the trial.
An attorney who was on a lower floor at the time of the shooting, John Matteson, said such an incident was bound to happen at some point because of the large number of violent defendants in the courthouse and the relatively small number of deputies assigned to handle them.
"They just don't have the manpower to deal with it," Matteson said. "They're good folks, but they're pushed to the limit." He said that Nichols had shown a potential for violence during his first trial, but that the judge was reluctant to have defendants restrained to ensure that they would be judged fairly.
"Judge Barnes was such a nice man that he would hesitate to have someone chained," Matteson said. "But he [Nichols] should have been chained."
The shooting started shortly after 9 a.m. EST in the courtroom as Barnes was dispensing with a civil matter before hearing motions involving Nichols, witnesses said.
After Nichols escaped, he first commandeered a truck by ordering the driver out of the vehicle at gunpoint, witnesses said. Nichols later carjacked a green Honda Accord from O'Briant, a features reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who was on his way to work.
In an account published on the newspaper's Web site, O'Briant said a shirtless man pulled into a handicapped parking spot behind a Chinese restaurant were O'Briant had just parked and asked for directions before pulling out a gun and ordering him to turn over his keys.
O'Briant said the man then ordered him to get into the trunk. He said he refused and was hit in the head with the gun.
"He must have been out of bullets, because he didn't shoot me," O'Briant wrote.
Barnes, 64, became a Superior Court judge in 1998. Among his recent cases was one in which Atlanta Thrashers hockey player Dany Heatley pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in the death of a teammate.
Branigin reported from Washington.
