Although Timothy John Kennedy reportedly had no motive, left no conclusive DNA evidence at the crime scene, and could point to another suspect who was indisputably hatching a murder plot, an El Paso County jury convicted Kennedy in 2014 for an execution-style double homicide.
But that trial, which took place after a judge overturned a previous guilty verdict based on new evidence and other factors, will now be under the microscope of the Colorado Supreme Court.
On Monday, the justices agreed to hear Kennedy's appeal. The court received multiple briefs in support of Kennedy from outside groups who argued that he may actually be innocent of the 1991 double murder near Old Colorado City for which he was convicted twice.
Although the state's second-highest court last year declined to reverse Kennedy's 2014 convictions, the Supreme Court will review all three issues Kennedy's lawyers presented to the justices. Kennedy asserted that the high court needed to address multiple unique and consequential questions of law, stemming from the behavior of multiple participants in his trial.
Police found 37-year-old Steve Staskiewicz and his 15-year-old girlfriend, Jennifer Carpenter, dead in a mobile home in March 1991, shot in the head and draped over each other. Months beforehand, a couple had kidnapped Carpenter, held her against her will for several days and raped her. Her kidnappers, Charles Stroud and Rebecca Corkins, threatened to kill her if she reported to police.
The jury at Kennedy's trial heard that Stroud was trying from his jail cell to hire someone to murder Carpenter before she could testify against her perpetrators, and law enforcement was aware of the attempted plot.
Kennedy was a friend of the victims and said he had been at their trailer until shortly after midnight on the night of the murder. Soon after Kennedy's alleged departure, several residents of the mobile home community reported hearing gunshots or something similar.
One witness saw a man from 100 yards away leaving the victims' trailer. The witness watched as the man appeared to injure himself, causing him to limp. Another eyewitness recalled seeing a man with a light green military jacket also running away.
More than four years later, prosecutors charged Kennedy for the murders of Staskiewicz and Carpenter. Kennedy reportedly had a limp at the time and allegedly wore a military jacket on occasion. A jury found him guilty two years later and he received a life sentence.
However, in 2009, District Court Judge Thomas K. Kane ordered a new trial. The Gazette reported that Kane found reason to believe a jury would have probably acquitted Kennedy in light of newly-discovered evidence. The judge also decided Kennedy received ineffective assistance of counsel because the defense lawyer failed to present direct evidence to the jury of the conspiracy by Stroud and Corkins to kill Carpenter.
At the second trial in 2014, the jury once again convicted Kennedy of the murders.
Kennedy appealed his convictions on seven separate grounds. Although the state's Court of Appeals rejected all of his claims, three are now the subject of Kennedy's Supreme Court review.
First, one of the prosecution's witnesses was asked how she learned of Kennedy's name. "I'm pretty sure when he was convicted," the witness responded. Kane denied the defense's request for a mistrial, but offered to give an instruction to the jury that the witness's comment was "inappropriate and inaccurate," and that they should disregard it. The defense turned down the instruction.
Second, the prosecutor misstated the evidence during closing arguments. The witness who saw a man injure himself while running from the victims' trailer had identified Kennedy in his 1997 trial. In the 2014 trial, however, the witness did not remember making that identification, and his 1997 statement was not part of the evidence.
Nonetheless, the prosecutor told jurors that the witness "identified Mr. Kennedy at an earlier hearing as the person he saw that night" and "he did know that that was Mr. Kennedy."
Finally, Kennedy pointed to a moment at the conclusion of the jury's deliberations that, he said, violated his right to a fair trial. Jurors had deliberated for seven days and on the final day, the foreperson sent Kane a note saying one female juror was uncomfortable finding Kennedy guilty. The foreperson wrote that the juror was "possibly emotional." After Kane read an instruction to the jurors, they soon reached a verdict.
When Kane polled each juror individually to affirm that they had found Kennedy guilty, the juror who was the subject of the note said, "Yes and no."
"I have to deal with yes and no," Kane responded. "I can't have you confirm the no. Were those and are those your verdicts in the case?"
Yes, the juror responded.
A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals decided none of those incidents reached the threshold for ordering a new trial. The witness who inadvertently mentioned Kennedy's conviction did not say that it was for the double-homicide case, the prosecutor's misstatement was a "small part" of her closing argument, and Kane did not coerce the juror into a guilty verdict when he told her "I can't have you confirm the no."
"Brief, polite questioning addressed to the jury by the trial court is appropriate during jury polling," wrote Judge Ted C. Tow III for the appellate panel.
Kennedy's appeal attracted the attention of 11 criminal and constitutional law professors at the University of Colorado and University of Denver. They focused primarily on the alleged "jury coercion" that may have resulted in the holdout juror being pressured to switch her vote. The faculty said the foreperson's description of the juror as "possibly emotional" was laden with stereotypes about women, and that Kane's options for dealing with the juror's ambiguous answer were to either send the entire jury back to deliberate or ask neutral questions of the juror.
"While there is some variation in the phrasing used by different trial courts, they all have one feature in common: None involves any suggestion by the trial court as to what the correct answer ought to or must be. None involves a rebuke, like the trial judge’s in this case, that the court 'can’t have you confirm the no'," wrote Ann England of the University of Colorado Law School on behalf of her colleagues.
Also supporting Kennedy was the Korey Wise Innocence Project at Colorado Law, which provides investigative and legal services to people who are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Citing the amount of evidence indicating that the murder-for-hire plot was really the cause of the victims' deaths, the organization said the case "also cries out for this Court's review" because of the errors committed during Kennedy's second trial.
The Colorado Attorney General's Office, which argued in favor of upholding Kennedy's convictions on appeal, did not oppose Kennedy's request for Supreme Court consideration.
The case is Kennedy v. People.
The Supreme Court also accepted two other appeals for review, both implicating legal proceedings from outside of Colorado.
In May 2021, the Court of Appeals affirmed the Mesa County conviction of a man who committed murder in Colorado, but fled to Mexico. A Mexican tribunal acquitted Rafael Aguilar Garcia pursuant to the Mexican federal penal code for his crime in the United States. But upon returning to Denver International Airport, police arrested Garcia and he stood trial in Mesa County.
Garcia argued that his conviction in Mesa County violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on double jeopardy, but the Court of Appeals disagreed. Looking to Colorado law and state Supreme Court precedent, the appellate court concluded that double jeopardy does not apply to prosecutions in foreign countries.
In the other appeal, Jose Luis Dominguez pleaded guilty in Washington County to felony vehicular assault for a drunk driving accident that seriously injured his passenger. He was ineligible for probation because he had two prior felony convictions, one of which was for attempted burglary in Nevada. Dominguez argued on appeal that "foreign convictions," meaning those from other states or the federal government, should not count in the calculation of two prior offenses.
By a 2-1 decision last May, a Court of Appeals panel disagreed. Judge Michael H. Berger, writing in dissent, believed that the law only applies to prior felony offenses as Colorado defines them. Consequently, he believed Dominguez should have had the opportunity for probation.
The cases are Garcia v. People and Dominguez v. People.
