Convicted murderer and former DeKalb County Sheriff’s deputy Derrick Yancey must wait for a judge’s decision on whether he will have a retrial.
Yancey, 52, filed a motion for a new trial, accusing his defense lawyers during the first trial of failing him.
“Counsel was ineffective in failing to call the blood spatter expert,” appellate attorney Ashleigh Merchant said Tuesday as she presented her case in DeKalb County Superior Court, alleging that blood expert might have disproved evidence presented in trial that put the murder weapon in Yancey’s hand.
“This testimony would have changed the outcome of the trial.”
The prosecution’s blood spatter expert inadvertently gathered evidence illegally, rendering it inadmissible and forcing him to only be able to testify about what he saw in photos and diagrams taken by crime scene investigators.
Merchant claimed DeKalb County public defenders Ruth McMullin and Letitia Delan should have kept the expert’s opinions from the court records.
“These two attorneys should have objected or made sure in some way or another that [Cecil] Hutchins’ testimony was indeed not based on … this illegal evidence and was solely based on the pictures,” she said.
DeKalb Assistant District Attorney Leonora Grant early in the hearing opposed Merchant’s desire to include testimony of a new forensic expert to refute blood spatter expert testimony from the trial.
“There is no basis for calling [an] independent blood spatter expert … in order to fill the record with what they wish they could have put in unless there is some nexus connected to these two attorneys' performance,” Grant told the court. “Exclusion is one thing. The admission of additional testimony is something entirely different.”
Yancey was convicted in 2010 of fatally shooting Linda Yancey and Marcial Cax-Puluc in the basement of his Stone Mountain home in 2008.
The investigation and eventual trial were sensational, as details revealed once-high school sweethearts and fellow cops locked in a rocky marriage with two sons.
Yancey orchestrated a plot to make it appear that Cax-Puluc, hired to do some work at the Yancey home, killed Linda Yancey in a robbery attempt, and was in turn, killed by Yancey in self-defense.
When police uncovered the truth, Yancey was arrested, but he cut off his ankle monitor and fled to Belize while on bond awaiting trial.
In that time, two private defense attorneys left Yancey’s services, and Delan and McMullin took on the case months before the trial.
Yancey was in the courtroom Tuesday as each of his former defenders testified.
“Our [blood spatter] expert that we consulted with was not going to be helpful,” McMullin said. “He did support some of the conclusions the state’s witness came to ... the ultimate conclusion about who fired and where.”
Delan, during pretrial motions, did argue successfully to keep the prosecution’s expert, Hutchins, from using information obtained from the crime scene, a fact that Superior Court Judge Linda W. Hunter acknowledged.
But Delan pointed out that the expert the defense team hired, noted blood spatter expert Ross Gardner, actually told the lawyers his findings would do them more harm than good.
“He said, ‘You do not want to call me to the stand because I will hurt your case,’ ” Delan said.
Hunter denied Merchant’s request to bring an additional witness to testify on the blood spatter.
Hunter could rule within 30 days on whether to allow a retrial. If she does not give Yancey a new trial, Merchant has indicated that she will appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.
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