PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2013
By Ralph Cipriano
for Bigtrial.net
Lawyers for Bernard Shero and Father Charles Engelhardt have filed legal papers claiming their clients were wrongly convicted due to judicial errors and prosecutorial misconduct.
The lawyers made their claims in separate documents filed on Aug. 1 with Judge Ellen Ceisler, both entitled, “Defendant’s Statement of Errors To Be Complained Of On Appeal.”
Michael J. McGovern, writing on behalf of Father Engelhardt, asserted that Judge Ceisler should have tossed a conspiracy charge against Father Engelhardt a lot sooner than she did. During the trial, the judge overruled defense objections to the charge that Father Engelhardt had conspired with Father Edward Avery to rape Billy Doe, the victim in the case, when he was a 10-year-old altar boy.
After the jury delivered its verdict and convicted Engelhardt of conspiracy, the judge at sentencing announced she was going to throw out the conspiracy charge as unproven. But that decision came after the judge had given “lengthy and repetitive jury instructions on conspiracy and accomplice liability thus unduly emphasizing” the conspiracy charge to the jury, McGovern wrote. The conspiracy charge took up 10 out of 44 pages of jury instructions, and one page of a two-page jury verdict sheet that listed “four separate charges of conspiracy and accomplice liability,” McGovern wrote.
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