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Murder charges dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct

Invoking a rarely used provision of criminal law, a Philadelphia judge dismissed murder charges Thursday against three men in a 2002 execution-style slaying, ruling that prosecutorial misconduct in their 2006 trial was so egregious that they should not be retried.

Invoking a rarely used provision of criminal law, a Philadelphia judge dismissed murder charges Thursday against three men in a 2002 execution-style slaying, ruling that prosecutorial misconduct in their 2006 trial was so egregious that they should not be retried.

"It's a horrible case," Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner called the charges against Aquil Bond, Jawayne K. Brown, and Richard Brown. He said he was not suggesting they were innocent.

"Our system was designed to protect the rights not only of the innocent," Lerner said, "but the guilty, when they are denied the elements of a fair trial."

Lerner said that if judges began making exceptions to the right to a fair trial because the defendants were "bad people . . . then I think we're beyond what makes this system uniquely fair and uniquely just."

District Attorney Seth Williams' office said it would appeal.

"These defendants are charged with a brutal murder, and two of them are already in prison for life for other murders," Williams' office said in a statement. "We look forward to retrying all three in the future."

The prosecutor in the case of Bond and the Browns was Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron, a 33-year veteran and deputy chief of homicide.

Cameron has handled some of the office's most prominent cases. He was co-prosecutor of last year's trial of West Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell and is co-prosecutor of the two men charged in last year's deadly Center City building collapse.

At issue in the trial of the Browns and Bond was what Superior Court called Cameron's efforts to vouch for and bolster the testimony of Vincent Smithwick, a key witness.

Smithwick was charged with the others in the Nov. 21, 2002, slaying of Rohan Haughton, but pleaded guilty and cooperated against his former Mantua drug-gang members.

Haughton was an associate of the Mantua gang and, according to court documents, disappeared on his way to take money to another associate and drive her to the airport. Police found Haughton's body the next day in a parked SUV, bound and gagged with duct tape and with a shotgun wound to the head.

The appeals court found that Cameron, in his closing argument to the jury, suggested that Smithwick's credibility was good because he helped authorities solve seven other murders.

That was not among evidence introduced at trial, and Superior Court ruled that it was improper for Cameron to have used in his closing.

The court noted that defense lawyers moved for mistrial on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct more than 20 times, but that the trial judge elected to give the jury "curative instructions" - explaining to the jury why it must ignore the statement.

"We question the efficacy of these repetitive curative instructions necessitated by the [prosecution's] serial improper questioning and argument," Superior Court added.

None of the three West Philadelphia men is likely to be free any time soon. The District Attorney's Office's promised appeal to the state Supreme Court would stay Lerner's ruling until it is resolved.

Moreover, two of the three are serving sentences involving crimes other than Haughton's killing.

Bond, 36, is on death row awaiting execution for the December 2002 slaying of 25-year-old Rasheed Grant; Richard Brown, 35, is serving a life sentence in a 2004 slaying.

Jawayne Brown, 30, is the only one of the three who has no other sentences or charges pending. Jawayne Brown's attorney, Coley O. Reynolds, said he expected prosecutors to move to keep Brown in custody pending the appeal's outcome.

"As difficult as the facts of this case were, I think Judge Lerner was pretty brave to rule as he did," Reynolds said.

"That's something that doesn't happen everyday," said Bond's attorney, Michael Wiseman, referring to Lerner's decision.

Indeed, it is one of the few times since 1992, when the state Supreme Court created the precedent, ruling in the case of former Upper Merion Area High School principal Jay C. Smith, then on death row in the 1979 murder of teacher Susan Reinert and the disappearance of her two children.

The state's high court first reversed Smith's conviction because the judge erred by allowing hearsay evidence, but also blasted prosecutors for withholding evidence from the autopsy of Reinert's body.

Before the Smith case, such rulings would have resulted in a new trial, but the Supreme Court found that the prosecution's behavior was so "outrageous" that it would amount to putting Smith in "double jeopardy" for the same alleged crime.

Smith went free and died in 2009 at age 80.

The three-judge panel of Superior Court ruled in February 2012 that the three men deserved new trials. Since then, the cases have been the subject of hearings on pretrial motions before Lerner, including a defense motion urging Lerner to invoke the double-jeopardy provision.

Lerner granted the motion, citing the Superior Court opinion's finding that "the prosecutor's efforts . . . constituted deliberate attempts to destroy the objectivity of the jury and to prevent the jury from rendering a true verdict."

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