By Mark Zaretsky
Christopher Calhoun is two years into a 45-year sentence for the 2011 shooting murder of a rival drug-seller, Isaiah “King” Gantt, in the former Church Street South apartments, but maintains his innocence and alleges in an appeal that two key witnesses were jailhouse informants who stood to personally benefit.
Calhoun, a 31-year-old father of five, is incarcerated at Cheshire Correctional Institution and has a hearing on his appeal scheduled for Thursday in Hartford.
The state charged Calhoun with murder “as a result of his shooting the victim … two times in the back and one time in the head, and, then, while Gantt was lying on the ground, one more time in the head,” according to court papers.
He was sentenced in absentia — without him being present in the courtroom — on July 29, 2020 ,in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, something his previous attorney, Tara Knight, objected to at the time. Knight has since been appointed to be a judge