In a stunning decision an appeals court has reversed the 2011 murder conviction of a 41-year-old drug abuser dubbed the “Harlem Kevorkian,” who was hired by a broke motivational speaker to stage his stabbing death so his family could collect an $18 million life insurance policy.
The unanimous decision, written by a four-judge Appellate Division panel, found that the lower court judge “gutted” Kenneth Minor’s defense by giving the jury confusing instructions during deliberations.
Minor is serving a 20-years to life sentence in upstate New York. He was convicted of murder in the second degree in April 2011.
Jeffrey Locker, a 52-year-old father of three from Long Island, was $300,000 in debt from a Ponzi scheme gone bust. He met Minor on a Harlem street in 2009 and asked him to make his death look like a violent robbery.
At trial the two sides agreed on the basic facts — that Locker hired Minor to kill him after greatly increasing his life insurance policies.
“The only real dispute involved the manner in which the knife wounds were inflicted,” the appeals decision, released today, says.
Minor had claimed that Locker provided the knife from his glove box, asked Minor to hold the weapon against the steering wheel, and then leaned forward into the blade several times.
The prosecutor argued that instead Locker lay prone while Minor stabbed him.
“If the decedent took no part whatsoever in the ultimate act that led to his death, it cannot be characterized as suicide, even if the record shows the decedent wanted to die,” the higher court said in the decision.
But the ruling said that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman went “substantially beyond” the law in giving her final instructions to the jury.
Justice Berkman had inserted the word “active” in the charge, saying that ‘If the defendant actively caused the death even with his consent, then that’s not assisted suicide.” The word active is not in the law.
Minor’s attorney, Daniel Gotlin, had argued that Justice Berkman misstated the law on assisted suicide as an affirmative defense. That law protects those assisting in suicide from murder charges.
“Where the court’s charge creates undue confusion in the minds of the jurors, reversal is warranted,” the decision says. The panel ordered a new trial.
The higher court judges said that while the prosecutor submitted “legally sufficient evidence” for a murder conviction, “the jury was also free to accept defendant’s account of events.”
“Under that version, a jury could have found that the decedent committed suicide because he committed the final overt act that caused his death, i.e. thrusting himself into the knife,” the judges said.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is reviewing the decision.