Court rules convicted cop killer Ronell Wilson can't receive death penalty

WILSON: The Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office has 90 days to decide how to proceed with his case.

 

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. --  A federal appellate court will not revisit its decision to overturn the death penalty for a convicted Stapleton double-cop killer.

The decision, handed up yesterday by the U.S. Court of Appeals, rejected a request by the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office to rehear the case of Ronell Wilson.

Wilson, who was sentenced to die by lethal injection following his 2006 conviction in Brooklyn federal court of murdering undercover NYPD detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews during a gun-buy sting in Tompkinsville in March 2003, had his death sentence tossed in June when an appellate panel ruled prosecutors denied Wilson's right to a fair trial.

The court ruled that prosecutors violated Wilson's constitutional rights by using his refusal to plead guilty or testify during the trial's penalty phase to attack his claims of remorse in an unsworn apology he read to the jury.

Yesterday's ruling puts the decision on how to proceed with the case back into the hands of the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office.

It's up to U.S. Attorney Loretta E. Lynch of the Eastern District of New York to decide whether to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court or put Wilson back on trial to retry the death penalty phase.

"Our office is considering its options," said Robert Nardoza, spokesman for the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office, noting, "We have 90 days" to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Wilson's attorney, Beverly Van Ness, said retrying the death penalty phase would be "traumatic and costly," and could tie the courts up for a long time.

"We are hoping that the government will allow this difficult case to finally come to an end, with Ronell Wilson receiving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of release," Ms. Van Ness said.

"The alternative is another sentencing trial that would be traumatic and costly, and which may achieve that very sentence," she said. "If not, and a death sentence was instead imposed by a new jury, the case would proceed through the courts for many years to come."

Wilson was convicted before Eastern District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis in 2006 on 10 counts, five of them capital: two counts each of murder in aid of racketeering and causing death through the use of a firearm, and a single count of carjacking with death resulting.

Dissenting judges in yesterday's decision called the facts of the case "heartbreaking," noting that Wilson executed Nemorin and Andrews from the backseat of the detectives' unmarked police car on Hannah Street as Nemorin pleaded for his life, then dumped the bodies in the street and drove away in their car.

"The cruel irony of the majority opinion, however, is that in elevating supposed imperfections to the level of reversible error, the majority breeds more confusion in already complex areas of law," dissenting Judges Debra Livingston, Jose Cabranes, Reena Raggi and Richard Wesley wrote.

Judge Livingston was the lone dissenting judge on the three-member appellant panel in June. Judge Roger Miner and Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote the majority opinion to overturn Wilson's death sentence.