The wheels of justice sometimes grind ever so slowly, putting pressure on families, suspects and attorneys. Here's why two murder trials have not happened.
By CHASE SQUIRES
Published August 8, 2004
DADE CITY - When 9-year-old Sharra Ferger was abducted from her Blanton home and stabbed to death, no one knew who Monica Lewinsky was; Tampa Bay didn't have a professional baseball team; Raymond James was just an investment house, not a stadium; and Princess Diana had just died.
On the day that authorities say Kristina Gaime killed 6-year-old son Mathew Rotell and tried to kill her other son in a botched murder-suicide, John F. Kennedy Jr. was still alive; Y2K fears were very real; and Columbine was just a high school in Colorado.
Airline passengers didn't have to take off their shoes to cross security; paper ballots were considered just fine for presidential elections.
A lot has happened since then. But the criminal cases surrounding the deaths of Sharra and Mathew have yet to be resolved.
Gaime, 40, was arrested in May 1999, less than a month after her son was found dead in the family van parked at her Land O'Lakes townhouse. Although she pleaded not guilty and has not been convicted of a crime, Gaime has been in jail for more than five years, awaiting trial without bail on charges of first-degree murder and attempted murder.
In Sharra's death, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office first arrested the wrong man, jailing neighbor Dale Morris for four months until he was cleared and released in February 1998. Detectives arrested two other men in June 2001. Gary Elishi Cochran, 38, and Gary Steven Cannon, 23, are charged with first-degree murder, and the state has announced it will seek the death penalty if they are convicted.
In both cases, trial dates have been set again and again, but something always comes up. Most recently, both cases were scheduled for trial Sept. 20. Last month, both were called off.
Neither case is expected to go to trial this year.
No one blames anyone in particular. Instead, there seems to be an acknowledgment of the complexities of the cases, sudden changes in attorneys, pretrial motions and appeals, and many, many witnesses who have to be coordinated.
For those tied to the cases, emotionally or professionally, time drags on. Delays have become routine. Trial dates, when they are set, are all but expected to go by without a trial.
"I can't stand it," said Karen Patti, Sharra's mother. "Every time they say it's a certain date, it isn't. I need some closure."
Living in Niagara Falls, N.Y., Patti said she is repeatedly jarred by memories of Sharra. Each time a trial date is set, it triggers new anxieties and sorrow. As the date gets closer, she said she becomes more anxious. When it's called off, the cycle starts again.
On disability now because of stress, Patti said she continues to see a counselor and thinks it will be impossible to sit through the trial or to testify if she is called.
Telephoned by a reporter this week, Patti didn't know the Sept. 20 trial had been canceled.
The mother said she has been crippled by guilt, beating herself up, imagining if she hadn't been at her job at the Lykes Pasco juice plant the night Sharra was abducted, none of this would have happened. She said she knows those thoughts aren't rational, but they come anyway.
Maybe, she said, seeing someone convicted of the crime would help her move on.
On the other side, Edna Jenkins said she is tormented by Sharra's death, and by the arrest of her son, Cannon.
Talking about the crime, Jenkins comes close to tears.
"It's nerve-racking. At times I feel I might have a nervous breakdown worrying about the future for my son and my family," Jenkins said. "At the same time, I feel that my son is innocent, regardless of what other people think. I have to believe that the longer it takes, the better chance of the truth coming out. Either the evidence is going to come up and prove that he's innocent, or someone will slip up and the truth will come out."
Jenkins said she was a friend of Patti's and watched Sharra grow up. She mourns the loss of Sharra, she said, as if she were her own child.
While she said she wept for Sharra and dreamed of the little girl, she is also saddened by her son's incarceration. Cannon has been in prison serving 15 years for an unrelated robbery.
"Every time the court dates come up, I get into a bundle of knots and I'm terrified," Jenkins said. "I have nightmares that my son is being put to death."
Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper, one of three judges who has taken a turn overseeing both murder cases in court, said she understands the need to move on.
But she warned that the charges are serious. A slip at the circuit level can render a trial moot if a higher court finds an error. Cases can be overturned, and the process would have to start again.
In Gaime's case, the accused woman changed attorneys midstream, leaving her new legal team of Lyann Goudie and Mark Ware to sift through boxes of documents. Gaime's team also switched strategy. While her first attorneys announced they would pursue an insanity defense, Goudie is after an acquittal based on the evidence. She announced in court that she is investigating secret evidence that could clear Gaime, and she convinced Tepper that letters detectives seized at Gaime's house were taken improperly and shouldn't be allowed in court.
The letters appear to be suicide notes. One explains how she drugged her boys and used her van's exhaust to suffocate them, noting, "May God forgive me."
Another is a note left for her parents, Gary and Kathleen McDuffie. Gaime railed against her ex-husband and the battle she fought to keep him from gaining custody of the children. She wrote, "I never thought I would give up like this."
When Tepper threw out the letters, prosecutors went to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, where the Attorney General's Office handles things. That office this month requested an extension to review the case and file its legal briefs. No hearing date has been set for the appeals panel to hear the case. Then it can take weeks or months after a hearing for a ruling.
Ware said the waiting is difficult for Gaime and her parents, but that they understand that cases need to be fully prepared.
"Justice shouldn't have time limits," he said. "We'd like to get in and represent (Gaime) as zealously as we can, but we have to take our time. You have to be as precise, deliberate and meticulous as you can be."
In Sharra's case, one giant delay was caused when Cannon's lead appointed attorney, Charles Lykes, was called up for duty with the Army Reserve. Daniel Hernandez, who was preparing Cannon's defense in the penalty phase, took over the lead seat but had to bring in a new attorney to start over on the penalty defense.
That attorney, Bjorn Brunvand, has asked for continuances because he needed time to prepare.
Cochran's appointed attorney, Sam Williams, said sometimes just coordinating four defense attorneys (two for both Cochran and Cannon, because it is a death penalty case) and one or two prosecutors, called in from Pinellas County, is difficult. Attorneys juggle many cases, and in Pasco County, where there are only two lawyers qualified to handle court-appointed death penalty cases, the caseload is heavy.
Cochran has been antsy at times. He has served an unrelated burglary sentence, and now he's back in a Pasco County jail, waiting. He filed a motion to fire Williams earlier this year but withdrew it. Williams said Cochran understands the delays.
So the waiting is a fact, no matter the conditions that have led to the delays.
State Attorney Bernie McCabe said Gaime's case is the oldest in Pasco County to go from arrest to trial. And Sharra's death poses the problem of holding together a broad cast of witnesses who move around a lot.
"As a general rule, it's pretty much accepted that delay doesn't help the prosecutor," McCabe said. "Stuff can happen. Memories fade. Witnesses can have tragic events occur ... Some witnesses you just can't find anymore."
In Sharra's case, one of the lead detectives, James Bucenell, has left the Sheriff's Office for the FBI.
Murder cases take longer than they used to, McCabe said.
"It was not uncommon in the 1970s that (trial) could be within the first six months," he said. "Then it got to be a year. Now it's about 18 months. The time frame just seems to have grown over the years. I don't know if that's a function of increasing caseloads or what."
With each Supreme Court or appeals court ruling, defense attorneys gather more ammunition to use in pretrial motions. More issues are defined; more rules have to be followed. It gives the defense more that it can do, and more than it is ethically required to do on behalf of the defendants.
"People seem to be doing more "stuff,' " McCabe said.
Tepper, who is scheduled to again oversee felony trials next year, said she is feeling the pressure of having such an old case.
She isn't alone. Watching over the case last year, Circuit Judge Wayne Cobb pushed, unsuccessfully, to go to trial then.
"This case has been around way too long," he said in November. "It's an embarrassment for the length of time it has been pending."
"The older the case, the more reluctant one becomes in granting continuances and the quicker one is going to want to reset it, within reason," Tepper said. "I'm sure for the public, and no doubt the families of the defendants and the victims, it's frustrating."
But rushing can open the case up to appeals issues, she said.
Cochran and Cannon are scheduled to go to court for a status hearing in October, and are set to be tried together Feb. 21.
But there is a pending motion to separate the two cases and try them separately. And the defense has requested DNA testing.
Gaime's case is tied up in appeals. Nothing can move until the evidence issue is heard by the 2nd District Court of Appeal and returned to Tepper's courtroom. After that, a motion Goudie filed must be dealt with: With all the media coverage over all the time it has taken to come to trial, the publicity may make it impossible to pick an unbiased jury in Pasco County, she argued.
When that's settled, then another trial date could be set. Sometime in 2005.
