A Brooklyn federal judge has struck down the death penalty verdict against Ronell Wilson in the execution-style murders of two NYPD undercover detectives because the convicted killer meets the legal standard for being mentally handicapped.
“Wilson is ineligible to receive the death sentence that has been imposed on him,” Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled Tuesday in a 76-page decision.
Wilson, 35, was convicted in 2006 of executing NYPD detectives James Nemorin of Baldwin Harbor and Rodney Andrews of Middle Village by shooting them in their heads and dumping them on the street during a 2003 undercover gun buy on Staten Island.
The surprise development outraged Nemorin’s widow.
“When something like this happens, my husband can’t rest in peace, because he is worrying about me and my children, and he knows what this is doing to us,” Rose Nemorin-John, who has re-married said.
Andrews’ sister, Ronese Andrews, called the ruling “bulls–t.”
“He was mentally stable enough to kill my brother and his partner. It’s all an act on Ronell’s part,” she said.
According to AWM:
Back in 2006, a prosecutor said Wilson was part of a Staten Island gang called the Stapleton Crew. The prosecutor said Wilson may have been trying to steal $1,200 from the detectives while they posed as potential gun buyers.
Wilson was convicted by a jury and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
In 2010, the sentence was thrown out by an appeals court due to a jury error. In 2013, prosecutors repeated the penalty phase and a jury resentenced him to death. Wilson has been in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, since the 2013 sentencing.
In a startling admission, Garaufis wrote: “To be candid, the court harbors doubts as to whether Wilson would be considered intellectually disabled by most clinicians.”
But he said a 2014 Supreme Court ruling regarding a low-IQ killer “strongly suggests that the legal standard for intellectual disability . . . has become more protective than the clinical standard.”
That ruling found that a judge in a Florida case could not rely only on the defendant’s IQ scores to determine mental disability. In light of that decision, the appeals court ordered Garaufis to revisit Wilson’s case.
Juries twice sentenced Wilson to capital punishment. The Bloods member greeted his first death sentence by sticking out his tongue at jurors. It was overturned on appeal.
Then, while awaiting a retrial, Wilson seduced and impregnated a jail guard in 2012.
Watch the video report below for more details:
Sources: OpposingViews, Daily Mail, WPIX