September 6, 2008
Fatal limo crash trial begins this week
It was a crash so horrific that then-Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon called it murder.
Police said Martin Heidgen, then a 24-year-old insurance salesman, drove drunk on the Meadowbrook Parkway in the wrong direction, slamming so hard into a limousine that it seemed to one passenger that the vehicle had exploded.
Tangled in the wreckage were the bodies of the limo driver, Stanley Rabinowitz, and 7-year-old Katie Flynn, who had just served as the flower girl in her aunt's wedding. In the days that followed, Katie's mother, Jennifer, of Lido Beach, took pains to convince the public that what happened was not merely an accident.
"It was so much more than that," Jennifer Flynn said, describing how she held her daughter's decapitated head after the wreck. "Drunk driving did this."
But in the courtroom, "murder" is defined by more than just a gruesome scene or a mother's agony. Attempts to get murder convictions for drunken driving deaths already were rare and difficult to accomplish, and now it will be even harder in light of two recent state appellate court decisions that considerably narrow the definition of "depraved indifference" murder. As Heidgen's trial begins this week, experts and lawyers on both sides say proving Heidgen guilty of second-degree murder will be a challenge for prosecutors.
'Unfortunate timing'
Nolan Rabinowitz, Stanley's son, said prosecutors spoke to him a few weeks ago, and prepared him for the impact of the recent appellate decisions.
"It's unfortunate timing," he said.
Jennifer Flynn said prosecutors asked her not to speak about the case as jury selection begins.
If the jury decides that Heidgen was as drunk as prosecutors say he was -- more than three times the state legal limit of .08 -- and that he was driving the wrong way on the parkway, then it must next decide whether what he did amounts to "depraved indifference" murder.
That crime is just as serious under the law as intentionally killing someone, and can be punished with 25 years to life in prison.
Depraved indifference murder is the charge that might be appropriate for someone who leaves a bomb in Penn Station, experts said: The person isn't deliberately trying to kill any specific person, but in effect doesn't care who gets killed.
Whereas in the past it would have been enough to show that what Heidgen is accused of amounts to an utter disregard for human life, now prosecutors will have to get into his head and prove that he was also in a depraved state of mind, lawyers and other experts said.
Heidgen's lawyer, Stephen LaMagna of Garden City, said that while what happened was a tragedy, it was not murder.
"As parents ... if one of our children goes out and drinks too much at a party and commits a similar tragedy, we know they must be punished. But we also know we didn't raise a murderer and that this child is not a murderer to be held to the same standard and punishment as someone who intentionally kills another in cold blood," LaMagna said.
Prosecutors won't say exactly what they believe happened in the early morning hours of July 2, 2005. But at Heidgen's bail hearing last year, one prosecutor said he believed Heidgen was depressed after a fight with his girlfriend and tried to kill himself by driving the wrong way on the parkway, which LaMagna and Heidgen's friends and family vehemently deny.
Drunk or not, it's murder
Prosecutor Maureen McCormick said she believes it's murder whether Heidgen was too drunk to know what was happening or not. But other experts aren't so sure.
"The fact that he was drunk seems to be evidence that he didn't have the depraved state of mind," said Michael Cahill, who teaches criminal law at Brooklyn Law School. "It explains what he did in terms that suggest that he wasn't making a conscious decision to play with human life."
Defense lawyer Stephen Scaring of Garden City agreed.
"They're going to have to establish that there was a reason he was going the wrong way up the Meadowbrook Parkway other than the fact that he was so drunk he didn't know he was going the wrong way," he said. Most jurors don't think of murder when they think of drunken driving deaths, said lawyer William Petrillo of Rockville Centre, who successfully defended Jason Rowley against murder charges in what police said was a drunken driving crash in 1999. But sometimes the circumstances of a case are so terrible that, regardless of what the law says, people instinctively want to see the drunken driver charged with murder, said Joey Jackson of Manhattan, who fought off a murder charge in the case of Edwin Rodriguez, whose drunken driving led to three deaths on Dec. 31, 2000.
"There's such public outrage, the public just wants to fry the person," Jackson said. "But that doesn't always mean that it was murder."
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.
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