Federal prosecutors urged jurors to give Ronell Wilson the death penalty at his resentencing trial yesterday, casting the convicted cop killer as an unrepentant murderer.
“In a word, the defendant’s crimes in this case are inexcusable,” Assistant US Attorney James McGovern thundered during his opening statement in Brooklyn federal court yesterday. “Borne out of free will and choice, for his crimes he has earned the ultimate punishment.”
In 2006, Wilson was convicted of fatally shooting undercover NYPD Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews during a 2003 gun buy-and-bust sting on Staten Island. He was later sentenced to death, but averted it after an appeals court tossed the sentence due to a prosecutor’s misstep.
Dressed in a white dress shirt and wearing glasses, Wilson looked on stoically as McGovern reviewed the chilling details of the horrific murders and argued that Wilson’s prison celebrity has afforded him a perverse jailhouse power.
“This defendant has absolutely no remorse whatsoever,” McGovern told a jury of five women and seven men. “He has not a single drop of remorse. If anything, you will see how this defendant has benefitted from his crimes.”
Glorified by gang underlings for his bloody résumé, Wilson even impregnated prison guard Nancy Gonzalez in jail. Their son, their baby Justus, was born in March.
Nemorin’s shattered widow began crying after McGovern presented a picture of her husband and their three children during a trip to Disney World just months before his slaying.
Defense attorney Richard Jasper Jr. lobbied jurors to spare the killer’s life and cited his hellish childhood as grounds for mercy. “The people who raised this defendant shaped and misshaped his soul,” he said. “He didn’t have a mother who baked cookies — she was baking crack,” he said.