Kill the bastard.
Prosecutors urged jurors to sentence convicted cop killer Ronell Wilson to death during their closing statements today, painting him as a remorseless thug who shouldn’t be allowed to live out his days as a swaggering prison celebrity.
“We ask you to impose the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime,” said federal prosecutor Celia Cohen.
As the Bloods gangster looked on without expression in Brooklyn federal court, Cohen hammered away at his the viciousness of his crime and the blunt lack of remorse that followed it.
“When a cold killer executes two heroes for greed and for glory and dumps their bodies on the street, the death sentence in justified,” she told jurors.
Cohen warned that Wilson would be able to revel in the sick jailhouse glory that has accompanied his executions of undercover detectives Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin in 2003 if spared the death sentence.
“This defendant has thrived in his role in prison and continues to be a predator in so many ways,” she argued.
Cohen alluded to Wilson’s impregating a corrections officer and his routine manipulation of staffers and inmates.
“He went into a room and had sex with her on numerous occasions,” he said of his trysts with guard Nancy Gonzalez. “He has manipulated the system.”
Wilson’s defense team will argue against the death penalty this afternoon. They have hinged much of their case on the effects of Wilson’s horrid upbringing on his deviant behavior in adulthood.
Cohen offered some pre-emptive attacks on that rationale, reminding jurors that Wilson’s childhood was difficult but not without people who cared for and tried to set him on the right path.
Wilson was convicted in 2006 of murdering the undercover NYPD detectives during a gun buy-and-bust sting on Staten Island.
He was later sentenced to death but averted lethal injection after an appeals court tossed the sentence due to a prosecutor’s misstep.