The jury rejects Esteban Carpio's insanity defense, convicting him of the murder of Detective Sgt. James L. Allen and the stabbing of Madeline Gatta.

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 28, 2006

BY GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- A Superior Court jury yesterday convicted Esteban Carpio of the murder of Providence police Detective Sgt. James L. Allen and the stabbing of an elderly woman, concluding that he was not insane at the time.

Marguerite Allen, the policeman's widow, nodded her head when jury forewoman Joanne Lemire, the verdict sheet shaking in her hands, announced "guilty" in a barely audible voice in a crowded courtroom.

Jurors decided that Carpio committed a premeditated first-degree murder of a police officer in the lawful performance of his duty, leaving the defendant open to the maximum punishment possible: life imprisonment without parole.

"Today is about James Allen," Police Chief Dean M. Esserman said later, surrounded by police officers standing in bright sunshine outside the downtown courthouse, "[and] the murder of a good man, a child of this city, a servant of this city, a detective of this city who gave nearly 25 years of his life in service and was killed in the line of duty."

Carpio, 27, a onetime barber from Boston who has a criminal record and wears a tattoo on his arm with palm trees and the words "Thug Paradise," managed to get Allen's gun away from the officer in a conference room in the detective bureau at police headquarters on April 16, 2005, and shoot him twice in the forehead and chest.

Carpio, who did not take the stand, argued through his lead lawyer Robert L. Sheketoff that he was in the throes of a psychosis, could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions and was unable to control his behavior.

Allen, 50, the son of a retired police captain and the father of two teenage daughters, who was known to his colleagues as a mild-mannered but skillful investigator with a prodigious memory, died within seconds or no more than a couple of minutes after being shot.

The murder appalled the city and badly rattled the Police Department, some of whose members said they were unnerved by the fact that it happened in "our house," where they find daily refuge after mixing it up with the criminal element.

The verdict on three counts against Carpio briefly loosed some of the pent-up emotions of the 14-month-old incident, with Carpio's grandmother shrieking in the corridor outside the courtroom, "He didn't get help. He was a sick kid. They knew he was sick.

"That's why you had this tragedy. He should have got help. He should have got help. He should have got help."

Members of a beefed-up security contingent consisting of at least 13 sheriffs hustled the relatives onto an elevator and away from a swarm of news reporters.

The verdict by an all-white jury of nine women and three men was reported at 3:25 p.m. on the 14th day of the trial, after about nine hours of deliberation over two days.

Carpio's relatives in the gallery began crying, including Yvonne Carpio, his mother and a teacher in the Boston public schools, who had taken the stand in her son's defense. She recalled how she had him picked up in an ambulance and treated at a hospital when he began acting strangely in the weeks before Allen's murder.

She and her son's girlfriend, Samein "Soul" Phin, who lawyers for both sides called a prostitute during the trial, testified that they warned Allen and other officers who took Carpio into custody for questioning in the stabbing that their suspect was mentally disturbed.

When Carpio's guards stood him up at the defense table after the proceedings yesterday, he turned to his mother and mouthed the words, "I love you, Mom."

"I love you, Stevie," she called out, using the English translation of her son's first name.

The defendant had mounted a long-shot insanity defense, with Sheketoff conceding at the trial's outset that his client killed Allen and stabbed 84-year-old Madeline Gatta outside her home in the North End of the city. Legal experts say the insanity defense is rarely invoked and rarely succeeds in Rhode Island and across the country.

Sheketoff had no immediate answer when Judge Robert D. Krause asked him if he wanted to submit a standard post-trial request for a new trial. Krause set July 6 for a new-trial hearing in case Sheketoff does offer that motion.

Sheketoff could not be reached for comment afterward.

Besides first-degree murder, Carpio was convicted of discharging a firearm while committing a crime of violence, death resulting, and assault with a dangerous weapon, a knife, on Gatta. He was returned to the Adult Correctional Institutions, where he has been held without bail since he was captured after he escaped from headquarters on the night that he murdered Allen.

The prosecution depicted Carpio as a cunning police-hater who was manipulative enough to exaggerate his mental condition in interviews with investigators and medical personnel.

On the other hand, the defense presented him as a man who believed he was cursed and that the devil was out to get him, and who was overwhelmed by the disembodied voice of an absent friend who sometimes commanded him to kill. At one point, according to testimony, Carpio tied a string around his waist to, as he put it, ward off the devil.

There was clashing expert psychiatric and psychological testimony from each side.

Assistant Attorney General Paul F. Daly Jr., the prosecutor, told the jury in his closing argument that the medical records "are strongly suggestive" that Carpio's sometimes bizarre behavior could be attributed to stress in his life and his use of the drug ecstasy and marijuana, which combined to cause hallucinations.

During the trial, Daly had found it necessary to scuff Allen's image, eliciting testimony that the detective had left his sidearm unprotected, perhaps with the security strap unfastened, and that Allen "probably was not a physically intimidating person." Daly told the jury that Carpio singled out Allen as "prey."

But right after the trial Allen's police brethren hastened to fix Allen in the public mind as they knew him: a consummate self-sacrificing policeman. Maj. Stephen Campbell, Allen's boss, said Allen can best be appreciated by noting the company he kept in the detective bureau: the investigators who made the case against Carpio amid awful circumstances.

"Police officers are heroes," Esserman declared, "and when they die, a piece of all of us dies, especially when they die in the line of duty. . . . Please remember him."

With reports from staff writer Edward Fitzpatrick and projo.com staff writer Steve Peoples.

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