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Jerry Conner, NC - May 12
Do Not Execute Jerry Conner!
Jerry Conner
May 12, 2006
North Carolina
Jerry Wayne Conner, a 40-year-old white man, faces execution on May 12 for the murders of Minh Linda Luong Rogers (“Minh”) and Linda Minh Rogers (“Linda”.)In August 1990, Conner is said to have entered the Gates County convenience store where owner, Minh, and her daughter, Linda, were working.Conner says that Minh and a man had teased him while he was there, and that he had left angrily.After going home and drinking a great deal of alcohol, Conner returned to the convenience store with a shotgun.He told several people that he was a DEA agent preparing for a raid and, brandishing his shotgun, suggested that they leave.Then, Conner is alleged to have entered the convenience store and challenged the man who had teased him earlier to a fight.The man left.Conner is then said to have shot Minh to death, before shooting and raping Linda.
Conner was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991, but had his death sentence reversed and remanded by the North Carolina Supreme Court.In 1995, he was again sentenced to death.However, in his appeal to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Conner argued that this sentence, too, should be reversed.One of the jurors in his second trial, a reporter named Helene Knight, had covered Conner’s first trial for a newspaper.Yet during jury selection, Knight asserted that she had not spoken with anybody having “firsthand knowledge of the facts of the case.”This was inaccurate.The Court of Appeals held that Conner was not entitled to relief, nor even an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Knight had been biased, because Knight hadn’t deliberately lied about her knowledge of the case.Knight claims, and the court accepts, that she had simply misunderstood the question she was being asked.However, the Court was not unanimous in this decision.In a dissenting opinion, Judge J. Michael Luttig argued that the appropriate precedent indicated that Knight need not have consciously lied in order for Conner to be entitled to a hearing that might determine Knight’s bias.
Of all the potential jurors that could have sat on Jerry Conner’s sentencing jury, Helene Knight was selected.Having worked to cover Conner’s first trial as a reporter, she necessarily came to the jury with preconceived notions about the facts of the case and Conner’s guilt.Whether she lied in order to be placed on the jury or not is unimportant; the fact that she cannot be considered an impartial juror should be enough to give any defendant a new sentencing hearing, not to mention a defendant whose life is at risk.Yet this was denied Jerry Wayne Conner.It would be unacceptable to execute him.
Please write to Gov. Michael Easley on behalf of Jerry Conner!
