Defense attorneys rested their case yesterday, saying that a half-dozen of their experts had proven that their client, convicted of murdering two NYPD detectives, is mentally handicapped and should be spared execution.
Ronell Wilson, 30, has been the focus of six days of special hearings before a Brooklyn federal judge, where defense experts testified that he was intellectually impaired following a childhood of deprivation and neglect – with a drug-addicted mother who was largely absent from their broken home.
Defense lawyer Michael Burt said the defense team’s “highly competent” specialists – including university academics, psychiatrists, and psychologists – had shown that Wilson’s intelligence ranks in the bottom 10 percent of the spectrum.
“We think that the burden has been proven,” Burt told Judge Nicholas Garaufis.
Among the litany of tests administered to Wilson by the various experts was one that involved “using a ruler.”
“That Mr. Wilson was not able to do,” University of North Carolina psychology professor J. Gregory Olley testified last week.
Another academic, Johns Hopkins neurologist Bruce Shapiro, told the judge that Wilson “was functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.”
“This young man man could not work. He had significant limitations. He could not do many practical household activities,” Shapiro said, noting that as a young man Wilson needed instruction on “how to clean himself and how to shop.”
But Brooklyn federal prosecutors argue that the evidence had been underwhelming.
The feds say most of the intelligence testing performed by defense experts demonstrates that Wilson exceeds the low IQ threshold of 70 that marks the boundary of the mentally handicapped.
Assistant US Attorney James McGovern told the judge that “the scores are clear,” arguing that “the vast majority of the evidence in this case has in no way advanced” the defense’s argument that Wilson is mentally disabled.
The prosecutors then asked the judge to reject the defense’s case, which rests on a US Supreme Court ruling that bars execution of the mentally incompetent.
“Their complaint should be dismissed,” McGovern said.
Garaufis declined to grant the prosecution’s motion, so tomorrow the hearing will continue with the feds beginning their own presentation of witnesses, who are to testify that Wilson is indeed capable and not mentally handicapped.
Wilson already has been convicted of the point-blank shooting deaths of NYPD detectives Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin during a 2003 undercover gun buy-and-bust operation on Staten Island.
The special hearings are focused on whether Wilson should face the death penalty or spend life behind bars.
Wilson was already sentenced to death in 2007 after a federal jury found him guilty of gunning down the two cops. He became the city’s first federal defendant to receive a death sentence since 1954.
But an appeals court reversed Wilson’s sentence in 2010, saying prosecutors violated his constitutional rights by telling the jury his decision to go to trial demonstrated a lack of remorse and responsibility.
Once the special hearings come to a close, Garaufis will eventually rule on whether Wilson is mentally fit.
If the court finds that Wilson is not mentally handicapped, then he will schedule a new penalty-phase trial for the Spring.
Jurors would then determine whether Wilson should be executed by lethal injection or sentenced to life in prison.
mmaddux@nypost.com