News: Recent Arrest and Sentencing on Long Island
(Long Island, N.Y.) In the early moments of Sunday morning a bouncer at a Westbury bar got in an altercation with two patrons. The bar, called “Mi Pueblito Bar,” is located on Old Country Road. The thirty-six-year-old bouncer was charged with assault and possession of a dangerous weapon.
The bouncer allegedly ran into trouble when two thirty-year-old patrons had to be removed from the bar. Outside, the altercation escalated and turned into a physical fight. The bouncer was armed with a metal baton, which he used to inflict damage on the patrons.
One of the men received nine stitches to the head in the wake of the incident and the other received ten. Both were rushed to Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. The bouncer was arraigned yesterday at the First District Court in Hempstead; bail was set at $1,500 cash and $3,000 bond.
In other news, the man convicted of killing Long Island motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker was sentenced today to twenty years to life in prison. The main issue in the Locker trial was whether the defendant should have been charged with murder or assisted suicide. Locker allegedly hired the thirty-eight-year-old defendant to kill him so that his family could collect a hefty life insurance policy and cover his extensive debts.
The defendant had admitted to the stabbing of Locker in 2009, but claimed that he held the knife in place in the speaker’s vehicle as Locker repeatedly plunged into it. He claims that the twenty year sentence was excessive and racially biased. Locker, a Valley Stream native, was a white-collar Caucasian and the defendant, African American, was allegedly unemployed during the time that Locker recruited him for the crime. The defendant also claimed that racial bias had kept the case from being settled years ago.
The lawyer of the defendant claims that he has every intention of making an appeal. Though he tried to portray his client as an Angel of Mercy, the prosecution prevailed at associating him with the Grim Reaper. The defendant pleaded for a fifteen year sentence, claiming to want to reach home before becoming a senior citizen. Fifteen years is what he would have received had the prosecution agreed to a plea of manslaughter.
Grounds for an appeal might include the defense lawyer’s claim that the judge accidentally instructed the jury incorrectly. He claims that the judge told the jury that the assisted suicide defense could only be used in instances of a defendant’s passive participation in the crime, and that active participation would fall under the category of murder. This, according to the defendant’s lawyer, does not appear under any statute, making the assisted suicide defense a plausible one.
The prosecutor assigned to the trial illustrated a different side to the case by claiming that no suicide-by-proxy could apply to the defendants’ actions. He claimed that because Locker was determined to have been stabbed up to seven times in the chest, it was impossible to consider the action anything but murder. The prosecution also deemed it implausible that Locker stabbed himself and was the direct cause of his own death. Nonetheless, reports stated that a coroner witness for the defense testified that it was possible for the defendant to have held the knife in place while Locker plunged into it.
