By Mensah M. Dean
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — The strange case of William J. Barnes got stranger still yesterday afternoon when lawyers for the elderly murder defendant rested their case without calling expected star witness Cyril Wecht, the celebrated and controversial forensic pathologist.
Lead defense attorney Samuel Silver called just one witness - Bucks County First Deputy Coroner Richard Kuntz - who spent less than 10 minutes on the stand.
Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron rested earlier in the day, capping four days of prosecution witnesses.
Silver did not explain why he and his two colleagues decided not to call Wecht or two other doctors in defense of Barnes, 74, who is accused of causing the circuitous death of a former Philadelphia police officer.
The change in plans clears the way for closing arguments this morning, said a “stunned” Common Pleas Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes.
“All the way up to this moment, I thought those doctors were going to take the stand on your behalf,” Hughes said to Barnes after she sent the jury home for the day.
Barnes said he approved the move and did not want to testify on his own behalf.
Frail, white-haired, bespectacled and aided by a cane, Barnes hardly resembles the 30-year-old burglar who, in November 1966, shot rookie cop Walter Barclay, 23, paralyzing him from the waist down.
Barnes served 16 years in prison for the shooting, but was charged with murder by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office when Barclay died of a urinary-tract infection on Aug. 19, 2007, at age 64, in a Bucks County nursing home.
Prosecutors said the infection was a result of the shooting, 41 years later.
The Pittsburgh-based Wecht, 79, who gained fame as a consultant for cases involving President John F. Kennedy and the victims of the Charles Manson “Family,” was to have helped convince the jury that Barnes should be freed.
Commonwealth attorneys planned to counter Wecht’s testimony by calling Michael Baden, another celebrity forensic pathologist who has hosted the HBO series “Autopsy” and worked as a consultant on cases including O.J. Simpson’s and that of late comedian John Belushi.
The trial’s key witness turned out to be Ian Hood, a former Philadelphia assistant medical examiner, who determined that Barnes caused Barclay’s death.
Hood, who now works in the same capacity for Burlington County, stood by his finding during three days of testimony as a prosecution witness and while being cross-examined by Silver.
Silver yesterday used Barclay’s voluminous medical records to try to make the point that the former officer’s health was compromised over his last 41 years by injuries from three car accidents, two falls from his wheelchair and by poor home-care that, in his last years, left Barclay with the majority of his urinary-tract infections, malnutrition, ulcers, impacted bowels, infected bed sores and even scurvy - a disease marked by a deficiency of vitamin C that’s little heard of in this country.
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