Cop Killer Escape The Death Penalty

(e3globla)- Cop killer Ronell Wilson was spared the needle Wednesday after a federal appeals court overturned a jury verdict sentencing him to death.

Ronell Wilson, 28, will return to Brooklyn Federal Court for resentencing after the reversal by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

The decision to take Wilson off death row was immediately ripped by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

"Commissioner Kelly believes that the murder of a police officer is an attack on society itself and should be punished with the death penalty," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

The panel ruled the prosecution erred in its closing argument by telling jurors that Wilson felt no remorse for the March 2003 slayings of undercover Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews.

If Wilson was sorry for the cold-blooded killings, he would have pleaded guilty rather than go to trial, the prosecutor said in the penalty phase of the federal trial.

"No juror found that Wilson accepted responsibility or showed remorse," the court wrote in its decision. "On these facts, it is hard to see how the government can prove that these arguments were harmless."

The trial judge, Nicholas Garaufis, failed to stop the government from making the argument, the appeals court ruled.

Wilson was convicted of shooting both detectives in the back of the head when a gun buy-and-bust operation on Staten Island fell apart.

One day after his 2007 conviction, the killer directed his attorneys to give up their appeal of his conviction.

The death sentence was the first ordered by a federal jury in New York since the 1954 electrocution of a man for killing an FBI agent.

Family members of the two slain detectives and law enforcement applauded the death penalty sentence for Wilson, who killed the two family men to steal $1,200 in buy money.

The cop-killer is currently on death row in the federal lockup in Terre Haute, Ind.

Of Thursday's decision, PBA president Patrick J. Lynch said:  "Ronell Wilson earned himself the death penalty with the cold-blooded execution of two courageous detectives who risked and lost their lives fighting to make this city safer. A miscreant who killed two people without a second thought will not hesitate to kill again in prison because he has nothing to lose. This vile individual should not be spared because of a mere technicality. He is a cold-blooded killer who deserves the fate that he brought on himself."