The bizarre case of Jeffrey Locker - assisted suicide or murder?

Assisted suicide or murder? The bizarre case of Jeffrey Locker

February 21, 2011 - 3:52PM

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• Bank account plunged from $87,012 to $5817
• Took out $14 million insurance policy
• Asked stranger to shoot him but stranger took money
• Locker impaled himself on knife I held: accused

Nobody disputes that Kenneth Minor held the knife that ripped into the chest of Jeffrey Locker in July 2009 as Locker, a motivational speaker, sat in his car with his hands tied behind his back.

Locker, 52, who appeared to have a good life - a loving wife, three children, a nice home in a comfortable suburb - died that night, slumped behind the wheel of his shiny black Dodge in what was thought to be a vicious murder and robbery.

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But jurors hearing the case that opened last week in New York must decide whether Minor was a coldblooded killer or a mere tool in an extraordinary plan by Locker to arrange his own murder - a claim that sounds outlandish, except that prosecutors have conceded much of it is true.

Nearly a year after Locker's death, they dropped first-degree murder and robbery charges against Minor, who says Locker used his motivational speaking talents to persuade him to do the unthinkable: tie his hands with a telephone cord and hold the knife steady as Locker repeatedly impaled himself on it.

His alleged motivation: to ensure his family collected millions of dollars in life insurance that would not be paid if his death were ruled a suicide.

"To make his plan work, he had to put out a contract on his own life," said prosecutor Peter Casolaro.

Minor now faces second-degree murder charges in a case that raises the question of whether it ever is acceptable to help someone who is not terminally ill to die, even if the person asks for it.

During three days of jury selection, many potential jurors were disqualified when they said they could not convict a person who helped another commit suicide.

"I believe in euthanasia," said one.

Another cited the "very, very long and painful death" of his father and said he wished it had been legal to help him die.

Advocates of euthanasia say the case points up the difference between helping someone who is not dying commit suicide and helping a dying patient end suffering.

"We're not talking about some lunatic being asked to hold a knife while you jump on it. That's ridiculous," said Geoffrey Fieger, who represented pathologist Jack Kevorkian against criminal charges related to his assistance in the deaths of the terminally ill.

Kathryn Tucker, the legal director of Compassion & Choices, which advocates for the right of terminally ill people to expedite their deaths, said there is a huge difference between what Minor did and what her group supports.

"This distraught man whose financial ruin pitched him into a desire for death is clearly different from a lucid, competent cancer patient who is suffering unbearably," Tucker said of Locker, whose business had collapsed during the recession.

"I think everyone can understand that."

Nonetheless, in opening statements, defence attorney Daniel Gotlin made clear he hopes to capitalise on the difficulties people might have separating the issues.

"The guy wanted to commit a Kevorkian," he said of Locker, borrowing Minor's words in statements to police after his arrest.

There have been other cases of accused killers using "assisted suicide" as a defence, with varying degrees of success. Most have involved terminally ill people whose loved ones claimed they wanted to die.

The most famous involved Kevorkian, the former Michigan doctor who was tried four times for helping the terminally ill die before being convicted of second-degree murder in 1999. He was paroled in 2007.

Perhaps no case is as bizarre as this one, which unfolded in the predawn hours of July 16, 2009, when Locker drove his station wagon from Woodmere, on Long Island, into Manhattan's East Harlem neighbourhood.

In the previous seven months, the recession's effect on his motivational speaking business had become clear.

The money in his bank accounts had plunged from $87,012 to $5817.

He had maxed out his credit cards. He had three teenagers, including one in college, to support, and was accused of benefiting from profits made in an associate's Ponzi scheme.

"He was ready to hire a killer" to end it all, said Casolaro, who has conceded that investigations revealed Locker bought $14 million in life insurance in the months before he died.

Casolaro described Locker's bumbling attempt to find a killer: by driving into Harlem after midnight and asking a stranger to shoot him in the head.

The man demanded cash up front. After Locker complied, the would-be killer left to get a gun but never returned.

"Mr. Locker was forced to continue his search for a killer," Casolaro said.

Eventually, he encountered Minor, then 36 and with a history of drug and robbery convictions, outside a Harlem housing project.

Minor agreed to the plan, but according to the prosecutor, instead of fetching a gun to kill Locker, he brought a knife and the telephone wire to the desperate man waiting in his car.

Then, Casolaro said, Minor plunged the knife into Locker's chest seven times.

Minor was arrested after using Locker's ATM card to retrieve cash - something he says was payment for killing Locker.

"Jeffrey Locker was a foolish, dishonest and pathetic man, but Kenneth Minor was a vicious and callous one," Casolaro said.

Minor says he simply held the knife as Locker lunged at it, and that Locker even demanded he move the weapon slightly after the first few jabs to ensure it penetrated his heart.

"When people are intent on ending their lives, they can do things you would find hard to believe," said Gotlin, whose witnesses are expected to include a forensics expert who will bolster Minor's claim that he moved the knife at Locker's direction.

Steven D. Penrod, a psychology professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied jury behavior, said he could not think of a comparable case.

An interesting wrinkle will be how jurors view Locker's reason for wanting to die, Penrod said. Will they relate to his despondency over financial troubles, or view it as a case of insurance fraud?

"Until you hear everything," he said, "nobody is really in a position to say this defense is ridiculous or plausible."

Los Angeles Times

Is hiring a hitman to kill you murder or suicide? Jury face extraordinary ethical dilemma in 'death wish' trial
By RICHARD HARTLEY-PARKINSON
Last updated at 1:57 PM on 2nd March 2011

A jury has been asked to define assisted suicide in the murder trial of a former convict, hired by a suicidal motivational speaker.

Jeffrey Locker had fallen into financial difficulties and wanted to kill himself, so he twice actively tried to find someone to help him die.

The first man he recruited, homeless Marvin Fleming, took the $4,000 (nearly £2,500) in cash along with some jewellery and knives but ran off without going through with killing Locker.

He then turned to Kenneth Minor, a 38-year-old former convict from Harlem, New York, who is currently on trial over his murder at Manhattan Supreme Court.

Locker, 52, convinced Minor to tie Locker’s hands behind his back and hold a knife at his chest - something upon which both the prosecution and defence lawyers agree.

However, they disagree on whether it was a coldhearted murder or an act of assisted suicide in which Minor held the knife as Locker forced himself onto it.

Prosecutor Peter Casolaro said: ‘Jeffrey Locker was a foolish, dishonest, pathetic man. But Kenneth Minor was a vicious and callous man.

‘Mr Minor ignored the basic principle of human decency, which is not to kick a man when he’s down.’

Daniel Gotlin, Minor’s defence lawyer, said: ‘Mr Locker killed himself. He wasn’t murdered by some wicked man.

‘This was an arrogant individual that used another human being to end his life - a person who was down and out.’

Locker, from a suburb in Long Island, had maxed out his $16,000 (£10,000) credit card limit and his savings fell from $86,000 (£53,000) to $5,800 (£3500) in the six months before his death.

Defence lawyers have said that his death had been an elaborate plan to defraud insurance companies, having taken out policies worth $14million (£8.6m).

Minor’s legal representatives described Locker as a ruthless conman who took advantage of his persuasive skills to get a ‘sucker’ to help his family get at the insurance policies he took out just before he died.

Lockers body was found, bruised and covered in blood, inside his car, parked near the Robert F Kennedy Toriborough Bridge on July 16, 2009.

Both prosecution and defence are expected to sum up their cases later this week when the jury will start deliberating its verdict.

Kenneth Minor Guilty: Jury Says He Murdered Jeffrey Locker
JENNIFER PELTZ 03/ 3/11 07:11 PM

NEW YORK — A man who said he helped a debt-ridden motivational speaker kill himself was convicted of murder Thursday in a seeming street crime that turned into an unusual framework for questions about the legal limits of assisted suicide.

Jurors delivered their verdict on the strange story of self-help author and business coach Jeffrey Locker's July 2009 death. The conviction leaves Kenneth Minor facing the possibility of life in prison; his sentencing is set for April 4.

It was a murder trial in which even prosecutors said the slain man wanted to die, and it became a debate about assisted suicide that strayed far from the more familiar context of doctors or loved ones helping terminally ill people end their lives.

"This was murder for money, not a mercy killing, which is why we prosecuted the case as an intentional murder," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement. "We believe the jurors got it right with their verdict."

Minor's lawyer, Daniel J. Gotlin, said he planned an appeal that would focus on an issue in the judge's instructions to the jury.

"I'm confident that this case ultimately will be reversed," Gotlin said.

Prosecutors had no immediate comment. Jurors declined to comment as they left the courthouse. Minor was led back to jail to await his sentencing; his wife, who was in the courtroom, declined to speak to reporters.

Locker, 52, was found stabbed in his car on an East Harlem street, his hands tied behind his back, hours after calling his wife to say he'd gotten a flat tire. Police initially investigated his death as the result of a robbery.

But the scenario changed when Minor was arrested a few days later after using Minor's ATM card.

In fact, Locker had been cruising an inner-city neighborhood miles from his suburban home, offering to pay strangers to kill him and make it look like a robbery so his family could collect as much as $18 million in life insurance, according to prosecutors, Minor's statement to police and evidence presented at the trial. A man whom Locker approached before meeting Minor testified that he agreed to the deal but then took some $4,000 from Locker and ran.

And Locker left a trail of clues about his plan, including computer searches for funeral arrangements, an e-mail telling his wife how to divvy up and shield their assets "when I am gone" and purchases of about $14 million in life insurance in his final months, in addition to $4 million in insurance he already had, evidence showed at his trial. Locker's family has declined to comment.

After being conned by the first man who took his offer, according to prosecutors, Locker approached Minor on an East Harlem street. A father of two who told police he'd worked as a computer technician, Minor, 38, has a history of drug problems and arrests.

He told investigators he initially brushed Locker off but then began to feel sorry for him as the motivational speaker poured out his financial woes.

An investor in a $300 million Ponzi scheme run by Backstreet Boys and `N Sync mastermind Lou Pearlman, Locker was facing a federal bankruptcy court trustee's demands to return at least $121,200 the court said he had made from his stake in Perlman's enterprise. Locker had told the court that returning the money would force him to declare bankruptcy, and documents shown at his trial logged plunging bank-account balances and mounting credit-card debts.

Prosecutors said Minor murdered Locker by stabbing him seven times, pointing to a city medical examiner's testimony that Locker's chest wounds had characteristics indicating he was stabbed by someone next to him.

But Minor said he just held a knife against the steering wheel while Locker repeatedly lunged into it, and a prominent pathologist he hired testified that his account was plausible.

Minor's lawyer portrayed him as a sympathetic stranger exploited by a professional smooth-talker bent on carrying out a con game and unconcerned about the consequences for Minor.

"He was taken advantage of. . He's no contract killer," Gotlin said in his closing argument. He argued that Minor should be acquitted under a state law provision that allows "causing or aiding" a suicide as a defense to certain murder charges.

In her instructions, State Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman told jurors that provision couldn't apply if Minor "actively" caused Locker's death. Gotlin had objected to that language and said he'd raise it in Minor's appeal.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, said the concept of assisted suicide was being misapplied to a callous killing-for-hire.

"Somebody stabbing a guy to death in a car to commit insurance fraud – do you really want to equate that with giving a pill to a dying loved one?" assistant district attorney Peter Casolaro asked jurors in his summation. "Is (Minor) an angel of mercy? No, he's the Grim Reaper."

Criminal cases surrounding assisted suicide have often concerned terminally ill people and their medical providers or relatives. In some of the most notorious, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was acquitted of several assisted suicides before a 1999 murder conviction sent the Michigan physician to prison for eight years.

But some cases around the country have involved more casual relationships and people who were despondent, but not dying of sickness. In one example, a Texas man said a despondent woman talked him into shooting her in 1985 by offering her car and a couple of hundred dollars. He was convicted of murder.

A man who gave a suicidal teen a rifle and urged him to use it in 1988 in a small town near Syracuse, N.Y., wasn't charged with murder but was convicted of the lesser offense of manslaughter.

Minor offered before his trial to plead guilty to manslaughter, but prosecutors didn't take him up on it.