This accused killer wants to call a doctor to the witness stand — a witch doctor.
Bakary Camara, of Senegal, who goes on trial tomorrow in the horrific rape and murder of a beautiful CUNY student in Manhattan, plans to call the “witch doctor” as an expert defense witness so he can blame the murder on an African “curse,” The Post has learned.
Manhattan prosecutors are not amused and are fighting the tactic, deriding it in court papers as “hardly persuasive” and “clearly irrelevant.”
“The people respectfully request the court to preclude the defense from calling a ‘witch doctor’ at trial,” lead prosecutor Evan Krutoy wrote to the trial judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, last week.
“It is difficult to imagine how a ‘witch doctor’ could be qualified in a court of law,” he complained. “The defense cannot credibly argue that witchcraft is a profession [with] scientific knowledge or skill.”
Camara is accused of hacking to death his ex-girlfriend, Borough of Manhattan Community College student Rita Morelli, 36, inside her East Harlem apartment on Nov. 23. Her live-in boyfriend came home to find her throat slashed and with multiple stab wounds to the chest.
The judge has yet to address the DA’s request. Defense lawyer Seema Iyer declined comment, saying the issue is premature but she is still reaching out to the city’s West African community in hopes of finding a suitable “spiritual advisor.”
Morelli’s still-grieving kin are furious at all the black-magic talk.
“It’s nonsense and ridiculous. We are in the United States and not in a third-world country,” her cousin, Giorgio Morelli, told The Post.
“It looks like a bad joke. It’s an insult for Rita’s parents, who have been suffering so much. And an insult for innocent women who, every day, face the acts of violent men like Mr. Bakary Camara.”
Camara admits he became obsessed last year with Morelli, an Italian citizen, when they worked in the same high-end designer clothing store, 7 For All Mankind on West Broadway in 2010. He was a security guard; she was in sales.
It is unclear if Camara and Morelli had been lovers, as Camara claims in a confession letter he gave cops when he was arrested days after the gruesome murder. Giorgio Morelli insists his elegant cousin, a lover of fine food, museums and high fashion, would never have bothered with someone so “course” and “low.”
But prosecutors and law enforcement sources have termed the former relationship a romantic one.
“They put a curse on me,” Camara, a twice-married dad of two, wrote in a four-page, handwritten, misspelling-laced letter he gave arresting officers at his apartment on Valentine Avenue in The Bronx.
“They make me seck[cq]” wrote Camara, who was raised in Senegal but born in the U.S. “They make you do anythings. Could make you die fast or go to jail… you always be mad and sad. This is a curs,” he wrote.
“There is something in my mind tell me you have to do this you have to anything bad make thing bad thing hurt people,” the letter continues, disjointedly.
“I always think to make a suicide but I can’t. I only think to get kill. I meet that girl Rita Morelli we was very friend for nine months before we have a relationship.”
“I went to my ex-girl Rita around 8 p.m.,” Camara’s confession letter continues. “I kill her and I want to get kill is the only way I don’t wanna go back to prison is the only way or I will hurt again and I don’t want it this curs such to do anything. To hurt and destroy my life.”
The trial is set to begin with jury selection tomorrow. Camara faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted of the top charge, first-degree murder.