By John Brewer
St. Paul Pioneer Press
| Related Article: One family’s long wait for justice...and still counting |
ST. PAUL — Thursday would be Jeanette Sackett-Monteon’s first restful night of sleep in almost 39 years.
The widow of St. Paul police officer James Sackett, slain May 22, 1970, when a sniper’s bullet caught him just above his badge, said worrying about her husband’s unresolved death made slumber elusive.
Until now.
On Thursday, Larry Larue Clark, one of two men convicted in 2006 of ambushing and killing Sackett -- only to have his conviction overturned last year by the Minnesota Supreme Court -- reached a plea agreement and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Clark, 58, appeared in Ramsey County District Court to enter an Alford plea to one count of conspiracy to commit premeditated murder. The plea did not admit guilt but acknowledged the prosecution likely had enough evidence to secure a conviction.
As part of the deal, a first-degree premeditated murder charge was dismissed.
“It’s over. I can breathe a sigh of relief,” Sackett-Monteon said after the hearing. “I look back and I’ve come a long way, and now it’s kind of the end of the story.”
Clark must serve five years in prison and one year on supervised release, according to the deal.
He will get credit for time already served -- he’s been behind bars since Jan. 15, 2005, or for 1,474 days, just over four years -- meaning he will be released in less than a year.
The same plea agreement that brought peace to the Sackett family brought dismay to Dave Titus, head of the St. Paul Police Federation.
“This brief sentence is outrageous,” he said. “I hope he sits and stews, eating himself alive. Lord knows it’s been eating at the Sackett family for decades.”
Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said the deal, supported by the Sackett family, was the best option to close the nearly four-decades-old case.
“This case was hard enough to prove, given its age the first time around,” Gaertner said Thursday. “It would have been extremely difficult to put the case in again after even significantly more time has passed.”
It was 1970 when Clark and Ronald Reed -- both militant black teenagers involved with a group called the United Black Front -- set in motion a plan to kill a police officer.
The duo thought they could get national attention and secure permission to form a St. Paul chapter of the Black Panther Party if they succeeded.
Shortly after midnight on the day of his death, Sackett responded to a phony call about a woman in labor in the 800 block of Hague Avenue, in St. Paul’s Summit-University neighborhood.
An unseen sniper fired a high-velocity .30-caliber round from a rifle, killing Sackett.
Constance Trimble, a girlfriend of Reed’s, was arrested in 1970 after police identified her as the person who made the call that lured Sackett to his death. She was tried and acquitted of his murder in 1972. During her trial, Trimble refused to say who asked her to make the call.
Sackett’s killing went unpunished for more than three decades, until Trimble finally told police that Reed asked her to make the fake distress call.
Separate 2006 trials of Clark and co-defendant Reed ended with both men convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy and facing life sentences. Prosecutors didn’t have to prove which man pulled the trigger.
The two appealed the verdicts to the state Supreme Court. Reed’s conviction was upheld; Clark’s was overturned.
The high court said Ramsey County District Judge Gregg Johnson failed to instruct jurors that Trimble, a key witness in Clark’s trial, was an accomplice and that her testimony needed to be corroborated by other evidence.
The ruling granted Clark another trial on the murder and conspiracy charges, which he avoided by entering Thursday’s plea.
He declined to make a statement before hearing his sentence.
James Sackett was killed the first night back on the job after the birth of his fourth child. He was 27.
After Thursday’s hearing, Jeanette Sackett-Monteon, now 65 and remarried, was joined by her son Jim Sackett Jr. as she expressed long-sought relief.
“Now I can go on with my life and have some good nights where it’s not sleeplessness and worry about what’s going to happen next,” she said.
Copyright 2009 St. Paul Pioneer Press