Posted on 06/30/2010 10:44:16 AM PDT by presidio9
An unrepentant cop killer was spared the needle Wednesday after a federal appeals court overturned a jury verdict sentencing him to death.
Ronell Wilson, 28, will return to Brooklyn Federal Court for resentencing after the reversal by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The decision to take Wilson off death row was immediately ripped by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
"Commissioner Kelly believes that the murder of a police officer is an attack on society itself and should be punished with the death penalty," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
The panel ruled the prosecution erred in its closing argument by telling jurors that Wilson felt no remorse for the March 2003 slayings of undercover Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews.
If Wilson was sorry for the cold-blooded killings, he would have pleaded guilty rather than go to trial, the prosecutor said in the penalty phase of the federal trial.
"No juror found that Wilson accepted responsibility or showed remorse," the court wrote in its decision. "On these facts, it is hard to see how the government can prove that these arguments were harmless."
The trial judge, Nicholas Garaufis, failed to stop the government from making the argument, the appeals court ruled.
Wilson was convicted of shooting both detectives in the back of the head when a gun buy-and-bust operation on Staten Island fell apart.
One day after his 2007 conviction, the killer directed his attorneys to give up their appeal of his conviction.
The death sentence was the first ordered by a federal jury in New York since the 1954 electrocution of a man for killing an FBI agent.
Family members of the two slain detectives and law enforcement applauded the death penalty sentence for Wilson, who killed the two family men to steal $1,200 in buy money.
The cop-killer is currently on death row in the federal lockup in Terre Haute, Ind.
Of Thursday's decision, PBA president Patrick J. Lynch said: "Ronell Wilson earned himself the death penalty with the cold-blooded execution of two courageous detectives who risked and lost their lives fighting to make this city safer. A miscreant who killed two people without a second thought will not hesitate to kill again in prison because he has nothing to lose. This vile individual should not be spared because of a mere technicality. He is a cold-blooded killer who deserves the fate that he brought on himself."
Obama voter.
Even if his life was terminated on death row, he’d still be voting for obama and the D’s for decades to come.
Hon. Justice Nicholas G. Garaufis United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Appointed May 25, 2000 by Impeached President William Jefferson Clinton.
Elections have consequences.
I wonder what would happen if the US had a prison solely for those who are lifers. Let it have a general population with no cells and let them work things out themselves.
It would be an interesting social experiment.
Leftists hate the police because they believe that the police are racist. They will do anything they can to block the work of the police.
Federal judges generally favor the criminal element of our society.
The ACLU would term that “cruel and inhumane,” but slightly less inhumane than capital punishment.
Ronell will get conjugal visits with hookers, maybe furloughs, and definitely early parole.
40 plus years of housing, meals, healthcare, cable TV, free legal services, and many other benefits.
Are the jurors going to be paid for the waste of time inflicted on them?
Who said “First we kill all the lawyers.”? Maybe another occupant of the court should be included.
Where is a Conservative reporter with the balls to ask Clinton if he supports this decision? Make slick Willie defend himself and this turd of a judge.
Where is a Conservative reporter with the balls to ask Clinton if he supports this decision? Make slick Willie defend himself and this turd of a judge.
as I understand it the trial judge gave him the death penalty. It was the Federal appeals court that scr*w*d the pooch.
“Leftists hate the police because they believe that the police are racist. They will do anything they can to block the work of the police.”
Meanwhile the two undercover police officers killed by this scumb were both black.
You are correct. The appeals court actually ruled 3-1, with the female GW Bush judge disenting the male Reagan and GHW Bush judges.
No, it was the prosecutors who screwed the pooch. Prosecutors generally cannot ask jurors to draw negative inferences from a defendant’s failure to testify (since that would undermine the 5th amendment right against self-incrimination) or failure to plead guilty (since that would undermine the 6th amendment right to a fair trial). From the statements they made during sentencing, it sounds like the prosecutors crossed the line, and (as bad as it may be to take this animal off of death row) it sounds like this was a legally correct decision.
I haven’t read the decision in full, so I don’t know where the case stands procedurally at the moment, but I do hope that the prosecutors get a second chance at sentencing here - even without the improper statements, there is clearly more than enough here to justify the death penalty.
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