Judicial Reports: LexPress: Death Sentence

By Lily Henning
01-31-07

Ronell Wilson receives an historic judgment, a terrorist doctor is found more terrorist than doctor, and a knife-wielding husband claims self-defense. 

 

DEATH SENTENCE 
The jury in the Ronell Wilson case delivered an historic verdict last night, sentencing the 24-year-old to death. Wilson, who was convicted by the same jury of killing two police detectives on Staten Island, is the first person in New York to receive a death sentence in 50 years. It was a dramatic end to a closely watched and emotional trial. After the verdict was read Wilson stuck his tongue out at the families of the victims. His younger brother cursed the jurors, and his mother “cried out that they were ‘the murderers now,’ ” Michael Brick reports in The New York Times. After beginning deliberations Monday afternoon, the anonymous jury of seven men and five women took just nine hours to reach a sentencing decision. Wilson shot James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews in the back of the head during a weapons sting in 2003. Now Judge Nicholas Garaufis of federal court in Brooklyn will decide whether to impose the jury’s recommendation of a sentence of death by lethal injection. The decision could be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a process that could take years. (An appeal from Vermont was entered in the Second Circuit a year ago and has yet to be decided.) Wilson joins 46 people on federal death row. See coverage in the Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Sun, and Newsday.

HIS NAME IS MUDD
A doctor who allegedly promised to treat wounded al Qaeda fighters can be prosecuted for providing material support to a terrorist organization, Southern District Judge Loretta Preska ruled this week. Defense attorneys for Rafiq Sabir had argued that the prosecution of the Ivy League-educated doctor deprived him of his right to practice medicine, by criminializing his professional activities. But Preska wrote in her decision that there is a difference between simply practicing medicine, and being “personnel” for al Qaeda, the New York Law Journal reports. “Sabir is not charged merely for being a doctor or for performing medical services. Here, Sabir is alleged essentially to have volunteered as a medic for the al Qaeda military, offering to make himself available specifically to attend to the wounds of injured fighters,” Preska wrote. “Much as a military force needs weapons, ammunition, trucks, food, and shelter, it needs medical personnel to tend to its wounded." Sabir was arrested in May 2005 in Florida, and accused in a plot to assist terrorist organizations, along with a New York jazz musician and two other men.

DOMESTIC DEFENSE, DOMESTIC OFFENSE
The trial of the elderly Upper East Side man accused of stabbing his wife to death is shaping into a confusing account of an unhappy marriage. Ben Odierno says his relationship with his 57-year-old wife turned from “heaven to hell.” He says he killed her in self-defense, that she taunted him, yelled at him, threatened him – then filed for a divorce. Prosecutors say Christine Odierno, who died after receiving 40 stab wounds, was the real victim. Ben Odierno told a jury in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday that he “didn’t mean to kill” his wife, and did it only after she lunged at him with a salad knife. The Post reports, that as cross-examination began late yesterday, prosecutor Kerry O'Connell asked Odierno “if he believed he was stronger than his wife on the night of the murder. Odierno weighed 225 pounds; his wife weighed 116 pounds. ‘I honestly believe that if you put it to that, I think my wife would have wiped me out,’ Odierno answered, with a smile and a self-deprecating shrug. ‘Really,’ the prosecutor snapped. ‘And that's not what happened on that night, is it?’ A defense objection was quickly sustained.”

Posted by Lily on January 31, 2007 07:34 AM to Judicial Reports