A man sentenced to life without parole after pleading guilty nine years ago to killing and dismembering a Dunwoody man over a drug debt in 1997 should be allowed to argue that his conviction should be thrown out, the state Supreme Court ruled this week.
Years after his conviction for the shooting death of 39-year-old Ronnie Davis of Dunwoody, Michael Lejeune filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, alleging that his plea was invalid. He said he was never advised that, if he had instead insisted on a trial, he would not have been compelled to testify against himself.
On Monday, the Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, sent the case back to a lower court so Lejeune can argue that his guilty plea was not given voluntarily.
According to prosecutors, Lejeune, a cocaine dealer, shot Davis in the head over a $200 drug debt at Lejeune’s Roswell Road apartment, shoved the body into his bathtub and spent hours cutting up the body.
Lejeune took the body parts to a small cemetery in northern Forsyth County, prosecutors alleged, and set most of the remains on fire. Realizing that the .38-caliber bullet was still in his victim’s head, Lejeune cut the head off, keeping it in a bucket of cement for days as he took it back and forth from his apartment to his parent’s lakeside home in Buford before finally dumping it in Lake Lanier, prosecutors said.
The victim’s head was never recovered.
Lejeune entered the guilty plea in the middle of his 2005 death penalty trial in Fulton County Superior Court.
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