State hopes to end Peterson case
FILE ** Kathleen Peterson is shown in this undated family handout photo. Peterson's husband, novelist Michael Peterson, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, in Durham, N.C., for beating to death his wife Kathleen, whose body was found at the foot of a staircase. (AP Photo/Peterson Family, via The News & Observer, File)
FILE ** Michael Peterson, center, makes a statement following a court appearance at the Durham County, N.C., courthouse, in this Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2002, file photo. His sons Todd, right, Clayton, second from left, and attorney Thomas Maher, left, are at his side. Peterson has been charged with killing his wife Kathleen. Peterson's trial is scheduled to start Monday, May 5, 2003. (AP Photo/ Herald-Sun, Ellen Ozier, File)
DURHAM Mike Peterson, the novelist serving a life sentence for killing his wife, won't get a new trial or a hearing about that possibility if the state attorney general gets his way.
In a 90-page document filed in Durham County court Friday, state Attorney General Roy Cooper and three lawyers in his office suggest the convicted killer's latest appeal for a new trial should be rejected.
In November, two Richmond lawyers put forth a new theory for how Kathleen Peterson ended up dead on Dec. 9, 2001, inside the large home she shared in Durham with her husband. They posited that a tire iron a tool that one of the Petersons' neighbors found in his yard several days after Kathleen's death could have been behind the fatal blow to her head.
The move came more than five years after a jury convicted Peterson of first-degree murder and a year after the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Peterson has exhausted all but the slimmest hopes of winning a new trial.
In the request late last year for a new trial, Jason Anthony and Burkhardt Beale alleged that prosecutors trying the Peterson case withheld crucial evidence about the tire iron from defense lawyers.
In the response Friday, the state disputed that claim and suggested that Peterson is trying a new defense after his lawyers' claims throughout the trial that Kathleen Peterson died after stumbling down the staircase in a drunken- and drug-induced stupor.
The choice of accident as the means to try to avoid the jury's determination of the fact that defendant did murder his wife was rational, the state document says, and in effect defendant wants another chance to go with another theory simply because his first theory did not succeed in avoiding the jury's determination. The claim now that an unknown intruder was a better defense or a supplementary one to accident is self-serving and pretentious.
In December, Orlando Hudson, Durham's chief resident Superior Court judge, said he planned to hold a hearing on the matter, but that he wanted the lawyers to get together first and narrow the issues that would be considered.
On Friday, Hudson said he would review the state's response before deciding whether to go ahead.
Prosecutors claimed Mike Peterson had beaten his wife with a fireplace poker, causing the trauma and head wounds that medical examiners reported as the cause of death.
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