Home > Our Blog > Prosecution to Jury in Jeffrey Conroy Trial: Ignore the “Smoke and Mirrors”

Blog Post

Prosecution to Jury in Jeffrey Conroy Trial: Ignore the “Smoke and Mirrors”

Posted April 13, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch

Calling Jeffrey Conroy’s defense strategy “smoke and mirrors,” “offensive,” and “insulting,” assistant district attorney Megan O’Donnell steamrolled through her closing statement today at Riverhead’s criminal court, where Conroy is on trial for allegedly stabbing and killing Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero in a November 2008 hate attack.

O’Donnell dismissed various arguments put forth by the defense as “excuses,” and instead revisited testimony by witnesses and experts that links Conroy to the murder.

“Yesterday, for three hours, the defense attorney stood in this spot, he looked each one of you in the eye, and he said his client, the defendant, was not the stabber,” O’Donnell began. “And then, if his client was the stabber, he didn’t mean it,” O’Donnell said.

“You know what the truth is,” she told the jury.

O’Donnell’s summation marks the end of closing statements in the Conroy trial. During the defense summation yesterday, attorney William Keahon said the trial had drawn more media attention in Suffolk County than any case over the past 30 years.

This afternoon, Judge Robert H. Doyle will read the charges to the jury, which include second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter—both as hate crimes—well as gang assault and attempted assault charges. After that, the jury will begin deliberations.

During her summation this morning, O’Donnell spoke indignantly about Conroy’s claim that he never attacked Lucero, and that fellow defendant Christopher Overton passed him the bloody knife moments after the alleged attack. Conroy had met Overton for the first time only hours before the incident.

“For 17 months, the defendant sat in a jail cell, held without bail with murder charges hanging over his head, having an absolute defense to murder and manslaughter, and yet, he keeps it quiet,” O’Donnell argued.

O’Donnell told the jury that to prove the hate element of the attacks, she simply needed to show that Conroy and the six other defendants were searching for Hispanics to attack. Whether or not Conroy had Latino friends was irrelevant, O’Donnell said.

To this point, she referenced a phrase alleged uttered by another defendant on the night of the alleged attack, which Conroy himself verified:

“Anthony Hartford said, ‘Let’s go fuck up a Mexican,’” O’Donnell said. “What other intent could you possibly infer from that?”

O’Donnell also addressed Conroy’s tattoos, one of a lightning bolt and one of a swastika.

Earlier in the trial, Conroy’s friend Alyssa Sprague testified that he had told her that the lightning bolt was a symbol of white power. Under oath, Conroy said that the tattoo was an homage to the San Diego Chargers football team.

“And what about the swastika?” O’Donnell asked. “What do you think the defendant thought that symbol meant?”

She continued: “He knew it was a loaded symbol, and he knew what others would think of it.”

Conroy and his friends viewed undocumented immigrants as “easy targets” who were unlikely to come forward and report crimes to the police,” O’Donnell said, citing one of the alleged victims, Octavio Cordovo, as an example.

Initially, Cordovo didn’t press charges against Conroy and several other defendants after an alleged attack on November 3, 2008, but in court, he testified that Conroy was part of a group that attacked him that day.

In the defense summation, Keahon pointed out that Cordovo told police that his attacker was wearing a red sweatshirt, and that Conroy was wearing a black sweatshirt at the time of the incident.

O’Donnell said that Cordovo, who used a translator in court, “[was] not able to effectively communicate with the police,” perhaps creating a discrepancy between the police report at the time of the crime and Cordovo’s testimony in court.

In the early days of the trial, Keahon posed questions about the ambulance response time after the alleged attack. While those questions received some attention in the media, Keahon told the jury yesterday that the emergency response wasn’t a defense for murder, and, this morning, O’Donnell called the theory a “red herring.”

Saying that largely volunteer ambulance crew was acting within regulations, O’Donnell asserted that there was “one cause of death for Marcelo Lucero…One cause of death: the defendant.”

Yesterday, Keahon asked members of the jury to consider a second-degree manslaughter charge, if jurors believed that his client perpetrated the stabbing.

The difference between first- and second-degree manslaughter depends on whether an attacker intended to cause serious bodily injury or whether the attacker was simply reckless, or taking unnecessary risks, and happened to cause a death.

While the district attorney’s office did not charge Conroy with second-degree manslaughter, it’s expected that Judge Doyle will add the charge this afternoon.

Speaking to whether the attack was murder or manslaughter, O’Donnell referenced Conroy’s intent:

“Risky is not bringing a knife to a location where you know you are looking for victims to beat up,” O’Donnell said. “It’s more than risky, it’s more than reckless. It’s murder.”

O’Donnell told the jury to look at the wound itself for proof of Conroy’s intent: the four-inch blade was thrust into Lucero’s right shoulder area up to the hilt.

“What does that tell you about the amount of force that was used by the defendant as he plunged the knife into Marcelo Lucero?”

According to the autopsy, the blade traveled less than an inch deep into Lucero, but traveled a longer path sideways, cutting an artery and a vein.

While Keahon argued that this was because the attacker—whether it be Conroy or Overton—stabbed Lucero sideways, O’Donnell argued that Conroy came head-on at Lucero to stab him, and that Lucero turned away from the blade.

No witnesses in the trial testified to seeing Conroy stab Lucero, but O’Donnell argued that the evidence placed before the jury proved Conroy’s guilt.

“You don’t need to see every piece of a puzzle to see a recognizable picture,” O’Donnell said. “The recognizable picture is that of a gang assault.”

Tags : hate crimes, jeffrey conroy, marcelo lucero, suffolk

Permalink Comments