The judge declines to punish prosecutors for the move but decides to seal the offending passages.
By CHASE SQUIRES
Published April 17, 2004
DADE CITY - A defense attorney for Kristina Gaime railed against prosecutors Friday, demanding they be punished for releasing part of a letter Gaime purportedly wrote detailing her plans to kill herself and her two children in 1999.
Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper declined to censure Assistant State Attorney Phil Van Allen or his boss, State Attorney Bernie McCabe, but she sealed the offending passages and ordered both attorneys to refrain from discussing any potential evidence that the judge has ordered kept from public view.
Gaime, 39, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her 6-year-old son, Mathew Rotell, in what prosecutors say was a botched murder-suicide plot. Authorities say Gaime drugged sons Mathew and Adam Rotell, then 8, and got into the family minivan with the exhaust directed into the cabin.
Gaime's mother found her and Adam inside their Land O'Lakes home on the morning of April 12, 1999. Mathew was found dead in the van.
Gaime has been jailed since shortly after her May 1999 arrest. She has pleaded not guilty.
As attorneys on both sides argue on the wording of Tepper's decision to suppress some evidence because of what she viewed as an illegal search, prosecutors this week sought to bolster their argument by producing a previously undisclosed letter they say Gaime wrote and left for her mother.
Prosecutors say Gaime wrote: "I obtained the meds today. I need to do what has been done . . . Know that the kids nor I suffered. First, I medicated the boys, and then I started the car and stuffed up the exhaust pipe and then put a hose from the exhaust into the car. The boys were already asleep and dreaming very happy thoughts. May God forgive me."
Defense attorney Lyann Goudie said she was outraged that prosecutors disclosed the letter.
In a motion Friday asking Tepper to punish prosecutors, Goudie accused prosecutors of an attempt "to improperly poison the public's opinion of this case, infect the jury pool, pressure this Honorable Court and to violate every basic concept of ensuring a fair trial."
She complained that the passage immediately found its way into the St. Petersburg Times in an article that highlighted what might be construed as a suicide letter and confession.
"You can't unring a bell," Goudie told the judge Friday.
Van Allen said the letter was included to bolster statements from detectives that Tepper challenged in a suppression hearing.
At Friday's hearing, Van Allen said there are 41 more pages of letters Gaime left in a safe at her home, and he asked that they be put into the court file. He said he is preparing to ask an appeals court to review Tepper's ruling that the letters cannot be presented to a jury.
Tepper allowed the letters into the file but ordered that they, too, be sealed from public view. She said she would alert judges at the 2nd District Court of Appeal that she never considered the contents of the letters, just the manner in which they were discovered. She suggested that Goudie advise the judges ahead of time that she would object to the appeals panel reviewing the sealed letters.
Tepper said she was aware of the intense pretrial publicity the case has received and felt double or triple the usual number of potential jurors would have to be summoned for the trial tentatively scheduled for Sept. 20.
Goudie has asked the trial be held out of Pasco County. She said there would be a better chance of seating an impartial jury in Pinellas County, which is in the same judicial circuit and would allow for an easier change of venue.
Gaime was in court for the hourlong hearing, clad in a jail-issued jumpsuit and shackled at the ankles and wrists. Gaime, who has suffered from poor health in jail, was wearing new glasses Friday and told her attorneys she has developed cataracts.
