Van Loan also pointed to testimony from prosecution witnesses Miller and Kelley who told jurors that Nicholas squeezed in next to Kelly in the backseat of Miller’s car, leaving a spot on the passenger side where Mattis jumped in after shooting King.
“This defendant knew exactly what was going to happen,” said Van Loan. “They’re going to walk down the street and [Mattis] is going to put a bullet in his head.”
Defense: Case is weak
While Van Loan sought to tie a single phone call and a mass of circumstantial evidence into a solid case, Gandin relentlessly hammered on what he said was the weakness of the argument that Nicholas knew Griffin and Mattis planned to murder King rather than intimidate him or persuade him not to testify.
“Maybe there was going to be a fight, maybe somebody was going to threaten him,” Gandin said. “Maybe someone was going to show him a gun and say, ‘Look pal, we mean business.’”
Gandin used the testimony of the prosecution’s two star witnesses, Miller and Kelley, to make the case that that Nicholas was ignorant of Mattis’ true intentions the night of the killing. Both women, who made deals with District Attorney Holley Carnright to avoid prison in exchange for their testimony, played key roles in the search for the informant. They relayed messages from Rankin to associates on the street and, in Miller’s case, drove around the city looking for King once he was identified as the witness. But both women, in statements to police after their arrest and on the witness stand in two previous trials, stated firmly that they were unaware of any plan to murder King.
Gandin also used the testimony of King’s father, who told jurors of a January 2010 incident in which he was allegedly menaced by gang member Rondy “Ski” Russ who warned of dire consequences if King continued to assist authorities. On the stand, King Sr. admitted that Nicholas had never approached him to inquire about King’s whereabouts or make threats despite the fact that he lived a few blocks away and regularly ran into him on the street. Then there was Nicholas’ near total absence from the recorded conversations between Rankin and his co-conspirators.
“Don’t you think that if there was anything in those hundreds of hours of phone calls, in that box of CDs, you would have heard it?” Gandin said in his closing argument.
Later, Gandin said that he believed jurors might have been swayed by the gang aspect of the case, including testimony by gang expert Peter Sheridan of the New York City Department of Corrections regarding the gang’s history and modus operandi (Sex Money Murder was founded in the mid-1990s in New York City’s Riker’s Island detention center). Gandin sought to bar Sheridan’s testimony, but was overruled by County Court Judge Don Williams.’
I think that it is wrong when the person that created the incident Det. Eric Van Allen hasn’t been charged for leaking the information that Charles CJ King was testifying in another shooting. Because of that leak CJ was shot and then they let two of the main player in the plot testify against others and they are being let go free. White Supremacy at it’s finest.
[Editor’s note: The allegations in the above comment have been denied both by Van Allen and District Attorney Holley Carnright.]
Of course they would deny what I said but how did the information get out about Charles King tesifying? To be truthful about the real deal is a crime to leak information about Grand Jury witinesses.