The jury must now decide whether Esteban Carpio, charged with killing Providence police Detective Sgt. James L. Allen, was insane at the time of the crime.

01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 27, 2006

BY GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- At the beginning of Esteban Carpio's murder trial in Superior Court, lead defense lawyer Robert L. Sheketoff posed a question to the jury about his client.

"Was he crazy, nuts, loony-tunes, or was he not?"

Everyone is now waiting for the jury's answer.

Carpio is on trial on charges that he murdered a police detective and stabbed a small elderly woman. Yesterday, on the 13th day of the trial, the prosecution and defense gave their closing arguments and Judge Robert D. Krause committed the case to the jury.

If not for a quick-thinking taxicab driver, a cunning Carpio could have pulled off the "crime of the century," prosecutor Paul F. Daly Jr. told the jury yesterday.

Carpio killed Detective Sgt. James L. Allen with Allen's gun on April 16, 2005, shot out a window in the police station by firing bullets in a semicircular pattern, escaped a station filled with armed officers, slid down the side of the building and very nearly eluded a citywide manhunt by grabbing a cab to New York City.

"James Bond would have been envious" of that kind of resourcefulness, Daly declared. "Jack Bauer would have been envious," he said, referring to the star character in the thriller TV series 24.

But driver Michael Crugnale, tipped by his dispatcher that the police were on the lookout for someone who had shot an officer, realized that his fare might be that man, according to trial evidence. Crugnale notified the police and Carpio was captured in downtown Providence.

"He almost got away with it," Daly marveled.

In short, the prosecutor drove home to the jury, Carpio was a man who made a lengthy series of rational decisions that day and could hardly have been, as Sheketoff asserts, delusional and detached from reality.

With the elements of the crimes virtually uncontested, both lawyers focused on the psychiatric and psychological evidence essential to Carpio's long-shot defense that he is innocent by reason of insanity. Legal experts say the insanity defense is rarely invoked and has rarely succeeded in Rhode Island and the rest of the nation.

The evidence that Carpio was psychotic and deranged before, during and after the day of the crimes is so plentiful, Sheketoff said in his close, that jurors only have one hard decision.

"Do you have the courage to actually follow the law" as explained by the judge and confirm that Carpio is not criminally responsible, Sheketoff asked.

He turned up the pressure rhetorically, directing the jury's attention to a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 90 people in the courtroom. "Look at this crowd," he said.

The onlookers included at least 23 police officers, all but one of them in plainclothes; Mayor David N. Cicilline; City Solicitor Joseph M. Fernandez; Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch and members of his staff not assigned to the case; Allen's widow, Marguerite, and at least seven other members of the Allen family; and Carpio's mother, Yvonne, and other Carpio relatives.

Krause gave the case to the jurors at about 12:35 p.m. and sent them out to begin deliberations. After about 3 1/2 hours, he dismissed them for the day with the instruction that they resume work this morning.

Carpio, 27, a onetime barber from Boston with an arrest record and a tattoo that says Thug Paradise, is accused of murdering Allen, 50 -- one of the longest-serving Providence police officers at the time, a detective renowned for his memory, and the father of two daughters -- and stabbing Madeline Gatta, then 84, outside her home on Swift Street in the North End of Providence.

The defendant was indicted on four felony charges, but the prosecution quietly withdrew one of the charges -- assault on a person older than 60, causing bodily injury -- in recent days. The omission was not mentioned to the jury, and during a recess, Daly declined to say why it was done.

The remaining charges are murder; discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, death resulting; and assault with a dangerous weapon on Gatta.

For 25 minutes, Krause instructed the all-white and majority female jury in the law that it must follow in reaching its verdicts. As he spoke, the wail of the siren of an emergency vehicle passing on the street outside wafted into the courtroom.

"A person is not responsible for criminal conduct . . ." if he cannot, due to mental disease or defect, "appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct" or "conform his conduct" to the requirements of the law, Krause said.

"It's not a medical question, it's a legal question," the judge said.

Krause reassured the jurors of what would happen if they acquitted Carpio by reason of insanity, but in deliberating and reaching their verdicts, he insisted that they not speculate about the consequences.

It would be "an intolerable situation" if a person was immediately released from custody after an acquittal due to insanity, Krause said, so state law requires that such a defendant be committed to the care of the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals and held as long as necessary until, after a court hearing, he is determined to be a danger to the community no longer.

Whether Carpio thought he was under arrest at the police station -- he shot Allen while being questioned about the stabbing, according to undisputed trial evidence -- was a main point in the arguments.

If not for the fact that he was crazy, why would Carpio have shot Allen, Sheketoff reasoned in his appeal to the jury. After all, the lawyer recalled, the police told Carpio more than once that he was not under arrest and when he asked if he could leave, a detective asked him to do the police a favor and stay to answer a few questions.

"Esteban Carpio could have walked out of that police station," Sheketoff said.

When Allen "confronted" Carpio with tough questions, his client lashed out, paranoid as he was and compelled by voices commanding him to kill, Sheketoff said.

Trying to address the point of why Carpio would kill Allen if he was not deranged, Daly said Carpio had plenty of reason to believe he was under arrest and that "the uh-oh factor . . . went through the roof" in Carpio's mind when Allen warned him, "You're in a lot of trouble."

"You simply have to be ruthless, depraved, malicious" and to hate the police as Carpio showed he does in a letter to a friend from prison, in order to steal an officer's gun and kill him, Daly said.

"Selecting Jimmy Allen as his prey," having noticed that the detective's gun was "protruding from his holster and unsecured" with a security strap unfastened, Daly said, Carpio managed to get another detective out of the interview room by asking for a cup of water and grabbed the gun. That alone shows premeditation and justification for a first-degree murder verdict, he said.

Toward the end of his nearly hour-long presentation, Daly made a play for the jury's sympathy and had an aide project a photo of the neatly dressed policeman on a large screen. Pointing to the defendant, Daly said, "That guy with the smug look on his face . . . he's still trying to inflict pain on Jimmy."

Daly obliquely referred to testimony by Dr. Martin Kelly, a forensic psychiatrist who testified for the state, who reported that in an interview with Carpio, Carpio said he had written a letter to Oprah Winfrey accusing Allen of trying to extort information from him in exchange for drugs.

He lied about extortion "to destroy Jimmy's reputation," Daly contended. "Tell us that Jimmy died doing his job. Don't let him define Jimmy's legacy."

Keep up with the status of the Esteban Carpio jury deliberations, view photos, hear audio, and browse more coverage of the trial at: http://www.projo.com/extra/2006/carpio

gsmith@projo.com / (401) 277-7334