By Shaila K. Dewan, The New York Times
Prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for the man accused of killing two undercover detectives during an illegal gun purchase on Staten Island in March, a law enforcement official said yesterday.
The decision, which will be announced in court today and was first reported in The Daily News yesterday, comes a month after the prosecutors said evidence showed that the defendant, Ronell Wilson, 21, knew that his victims were police officers and that he shot them in the backs of their heads on March 10 with a .44-caliber revolver. Six people have been charged in connection with the killing, but Mr. Wilson is the one who prosecutors contend fired the gun.
The case is the first death penalty prosecution for the Staten Island district attorney, William L. Murphy, and Mr. Wilson is the 14th defendant in New York City for whom the death penalty has been sought since capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995.
Only two of the New York City cases have involved police officers as victims. In one, the fatal shooting of Officer Kevin Gillespie in the Bronx in 1996, Gov. George E. Pataki removed the Bronx district attorney from the case because he refused to seek the death penalty. The defendant committed suicide before the case went to trial.
New York City juries have historically been reluctant to sentence a defendant to death, and have done so in only two cases since 1995: that of Darrel K. Harris, whose sentence for killing three people at a Brooklyn social club in 1996 was overturned on appeal, and John B. Taylor, convicted of five murders in the so-called Wendy’s massacre in Queens in 2000.
“There have been cases in which juries in New York have not given the death penalty involving the bombing of American embassies, which caused multiple deaths,” said Ronald J. Tabak, a lawyer who serves on the capital punishment committee of the city bar association. “They have not given the death penalty to a defendant who was alleged, and proven, pretty much, to be involved in organized crime and to have caused numerous deaths.”
That is one reason district attorneys do not seek the death penalty more often, even when police officers in uniform die. But Staten Island is more conservative than the rest of the city’s boroughs, Mr. Tabak said.
Investigators said that in the Staten Island case, Mr. Wilson and Jessie Jacobus, 17, had a plan to rob the two detectives, James V. Nemorin, 36, and Rodney J. Andrews, 34, but that Mr. Wilson shot them instead.