White Plains CitizeNetReporter - Week Two: The Dennis Alvarez-Hernandez Capital Punishment Murder Case

WPCNR WHITE PLAINS LAW JOURNAL. By WPCNR Legal Affairs Correspondent, S. Richard Blassberg. April 18, 2003: Week Two of the Dennis-Alvarez-Hernandez trial (which ended last week, the trial was in recess this week), brought no surprises, either in content or direction.

WPCNR LEGAL CORRESPONDENT
S. RICHARD BLASSBERG
Photo by WPCNR News

Prosecutors Patricia Murphy and George Bolen presented witnesses whose testimony firstly, confirmed what the Defense has stipulated from the start, that it was the Defendant who stabbed the victims, and secondly exposed the extent of the injuries and carnage encountered at the scene. To drive home the horror, for the benefit of the jurors, prosecutors employed a 4x8 foot model of Patricia Torres’ apartment. The model reportedly cost $6,000 and was admittedly not to scale.

Using the model, Yonkers Police Officer Elizabeth Wagner of the Criminal Identification Unit, a veteran of 18 years on the force, went from room to room describing for the jury what she found at the scene. Although she claimed to have examined “thousands of crime scenes” in her tenure with the department, she managed to become visibly choked-up before the intent jurors. Officer Wagner’s testimony on Friday morning followed two days of direct and cross-examination of Yonkers Police Detective Kraft.

Kraft, the lead detective in the case was questioned extensively by the Prosecution in an attempt to establish that the Defendant had sufficient presence of mind, several hours after the killings, to try to deny responsibility.

“The baby, she killed the baby. My wife she killed the baby,” Kraft quoted the Defendant as having told him upon their first contact. Additionally, prosecutors tried to elicit statements from the detective suggesting that the Defendant really wasn’t “out of it” following the incident.

The final witness of Week Two was Vincent Santiago, the 11-year-old who survived the stabbing, and whose eyewitness account placed the knife in Dennis Alvarez-Hernandez’ hand. However strategically timed before a one-week adjournment of the trial, and emotionally compelling as Vincent’s testimony may have been, nothing he said, in this observer’s opinion, cast any doubt on Defense assertions that the Defendant was simply too drunk to be capable of forming the intent necessary to have committed Murder One.

The role of the jury is to be the determiner of fact. The only real issue of fact to be determined is whether the Defendant was capable, in light of his intoxication, of forming the necessary intent. All of the evidence presented by the District Attorney’s Office through two weeks of trial has thus far failed, in this reporter’s analysis, to overturn the Defense position. However, that is not to say that the effort has failed to reach the emotions and sensibilities of the jury.

Note: S. Richard Blassberg, Author of The Jeanine Machine has been observing Westchester's first capital punishment murder trial in years, from the gallery. Here is his analysis of last week's action prior to resumption of proceedings next week.


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