Judge denies retrial motion

Circuit Judge Bill Wright has denied the defense’s motion requesting that Wesley Jonathan Williams get a new trial.
Williams was convicted in October of four counts of first degree murder and three counts of aggravated child abuse in the deaths of Danielle Baker and her three young sons.
Wright, acting in the capacity of “an additional juror” to determine whether the evidence supported the decision of the 12-member jury at trial,  issued his denial early Friday morning.
In it, Wright said in applying the appropriate standards to the question, he found that “it is clear that the weight of the evidence does support the jury’s verdict of guilty as charged on all counts.”
He included a narrative outlining the two primary reasons for his denial.
One involved the testimony of Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen. The sheriff interviewed Williams during the investigation of the case. McKeithen testified at trial that Williams had said “he was present at the scene of the crime, knew who committed the crime and that he could be charged with criminal activity,” Wright noted in his order.
Defense attorney Walter Smith, in cross-examining McKeithen at trial, had attempted to erode the impact of that interview by pointing out to the jury Williams’ statement had not been taped.
In his ruling, Wright pointed out Williams had requested an attorney shortly after making his initial untaped statement to McKeithen, and the court had supported a defense motion to suppress at trial “anything after the defendant’s request for an attorney.” That suppression, Wright said, “effectively negates trial counsel’s cross-examination about the failure of law enforcement to record defendant’s statement. Thus, the court finds that the testimony of ... McKeithen was credible and reliable.”
Wright’s second reason for denying the retrial motion, he wrote, was he believed the state had meet its burden.
“The state presented circumstantial evidence,” the judge wrote. “This evidence is required to be consistent with the defendant’s guilt and inconsistent with any reasonable hypothesis of innocence ... In this case, the state has met its burden through the presentation of several facts amounting to a well-connected chain of circumstantial evidence showing the defendant’s involvement in the crimes charged.”
Prosecutor Larry Basford asserted at trial that Williams was motivated to kill Baker and the children, in part because he was on the verge of having to pay child support for the two oldest boys he fathered, and may have believed he was also the father of and financially responsible for the third.
The state presented testimony from officials on this matter, and also testimony to support the state’s contention that Williams owed the IRS money. The state showed in its case that Williams had once claimed Baker’s daughter, whom he did not father, as a dependent in order to get a refund, even though he knew he was not the father. The state asserted that Williams blamed Baker for the IRS debt, perhaps because she had been a party to the refund scheme.
The state also presented cell phone records showing that Williams had called Baker nine times in the few hours before she died, with the last calls pinging off a tower near her home in Marianna. No further calls were made to her from his phone in the hours immediately after she was believed to have been killed.
The state had also presented witnesses who said Williams expressed anger toward Baker in the days leading up to her death, because she had revealed to his live-in girlfriend that he was also seeing another woman.
Wright wrote that he felt the state had done enough in its circumstantial case, and in the McKeithen testimony, to show Williams as a principal in the murders and abuse.
The law of principal in Florida, the judge explained, “states if the defendant helped another person or persons commit a crime, the defendant is a principal and must be treated as if he had done all the things the other person or persons did if he had a conscious intent that the criminal act be done and defendant did some act or said some word which was intended to and which did incite, cause, encourage, assist or advise the other person or persons to actually commit the crime.
“Thus, the weight of the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that the jury’s verdict was proper and correct.”