Ronell Wilson of Stapleton shot and killed Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews of the Police Department's Firearms Control Unit during a gun buy-and-bust operation in Tompkinsville in 2003.In a widely anticipated development, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has instructed Brooklyn federal prosecutors to pursue the execution of convicted cop killer Ronell Wilson.
"You are authorized and directed to continue to seek the death penalty against Ronell Wilson," Holder wrote Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Three weeks ago, a fuming District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis tore into prosecutors for not having secured Holder's response on how to proceed.
Last year, a federal appeals court overturned the death penalty for Wilson, who was sentenced in 2007 to die by lethal injection for gunning down Detectives James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews in Tompkinsville on March 10, 2003. The murder conviction stood.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors had said they want a penalty-phase retrial; however, Garaufis said in April he wouldn't allow it until Holder formally requests one.
Alberto Gonzales was the attorney general when the decision was made six years ago to pursue a federal capital-murder case.
The judge also said the slain detectives' kin need to know where the case is going.
Prosecutors filed Holder's response with the court on Friday.
A spokesman for Ms. Lynch today declined comment on Holder's decision as did a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman.
Wilson's lawyer, David M. Stern of the Manhattan firm of Rothman Schneider Soloway & Stern also declined comment today.
In January 2007, a Brooklyn federal court jury sentenced Wilson, a former Stapleton gang member, now 29, to die by lethal injection. A month earlier, the panel had convicted him of murdering the detectives during a gun buy-and-bust operation.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan had turned the case over to federal prosecutors in November 2004 after the New York state death penalty was struck down as unconstitutional.
In June of last year, a divided Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan threw out Wilson's death sentence. Two of the three judges reasoned that prosecutors had violated the convicted murderer's constitutional rights by using his failure 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.
In an opinion that dissented from her two colleagues, Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote that prosecutors were "entirely proper" to attack the credibility of the apology that Wilson read to the jury "because it came only when Wilson faced punishment for his crime."
Prosecutors did not appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Anticipating that Holder would want to seek the death penalty, Garaufis last month set a March 5, 2012, jury-selection date. In the interim, he scheduled a Sept. 14 status conference.
Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association said after Wilson's court appearance last month that he's anxious for a retrial.
"Anything less than the death penalty would be short of justice," he told the Advance.
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