The near decapitations of three young children in a Northwest Baltimore rowhouse six years ago stunned the city, and it took two long, painful trials to bring the men responsible to justice. Policarpio Espinosa Perez and Adan Canela are each serving life sentences for killing their three young relatives.
At issue is whether the convicted killers should get a third trial because the judge who presided over their second trial in Baltimore Circuit Court failed to disclose questions from the jury, asked during the trial, to the defense attorneys.
Those defense lawyers argued before the Maryland Court of Appeals on Tuesday that they would've changed trial strategy had they seen the notes. An assistant attorney general argued that defense lawyers have not shown what new strategies they would've employed.
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There seems little question that Circuit Judge David B. Mitchell erred by not sharing the notes. The question before the court is whether the error is enough to determine the defendants got an unfair trial in the killings of Lucero Espinoza, 8, her brother, Ricardo Espinoza, 9, and their male cousin, Alexis Espejo Quezada, 10.
These trials were among the city's most complex and gruesome, requiring months of testimony, witnesses who did not speak English and motives that changed by the day. And a new trial might prove even more difficult -- many of the participants have been deported and another was killed, allegedly by his wife, in Mexico.
A clear motive has never been determined, but ranged from unpaid deaths to help the family cross from Mexico into the United States to a violent domestic dispute orchestrated by the matriarch as part of an elaborate and sordid plot to avenge her husband's affairs by killing his two children from a previous marriage and his nephew.