Reviewed the piece by Anelia and Eric (her partner) about the Kehoe Case, Conviction relief hearing
We got to see a very recent and new story that just was in the court house – She was convicted of first degree murder, given the maximum 25 years for attempted murder and 10 years for the child endangerment counts
Anelia’s Story is Attached Below:
A woman who is serving life for killing her toddler son and attempting to murder her other child is asking for a new trial and claiming that her then-public defender attorneys, now both district court judges, were ineffective.
Michelle Kehoe, 44, appeared before Judge Richard Stochl on Thursday morning in the Black Hawk County Courthouse. The post-conviction-relief hearing was moved from Buchanan County due to scheduling conflicts.
Kehoe walked into the small, fourth-floor courtroom smiling while led by her attorney, Jim Peters, of Independence. She wore a red prison uniform and orange Crocs, her wrists constrained by yellow handcuffs and ankles by leg irons.
She was convicted in 2009 of killing her 2-year-old son in 2008 by slitting his throat, and of attempted murder, for trying to kill her other son, as well as child endangerment causing serious injury.
In addition to the mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder, she was given the maximum 25 years for attempted murder and 10 years for the child endangerment counts. The latter two were concurrent with each other but consecutive with the murder term.
On Thursday, during the post-conviction-relief hearing, her husband, Gene, sat in the gallery, along with other friends and supporters.
On the stand, Kehoe recounted a history of mental challenges, three suicide attempts and sexual abuse by her step-father. She also told the story of crashing through a bridge railing into the Iowa River while trying to recover her son’s pacifier. According to media reports, in 2009, she had told the defense expert that that incident was a suicide attempt.
During direct examination on Thursday, Peters established that after Kehoe was arrested following her 20-day stay at the psychiatric ward of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, it was the first time that she had ever worked with an attorney. It was also the first time she’d been questioned by police and her first time in jail.
Andrea Dryer and David Staudt served as Kehoe’s counsel, assisted by investigator Judy Long.
When Peters asked Kehoe about her first consultation, she paused for a few seconds before replying.
“My first, initial meetings were desperate phone calls,” Kehoe said. “The jail had picked me up on a Saturday afternoon from the hospital, received the prescription but did not fill them at the pharmacy, and I was left unmedicated for three days.
“Andrea Dryer first addressed that, helping get that expedited that I get my medications into the jail.”
Kehoe then said that the first in-person visits by counsel while in custody were “frantic” in that her defense team wanted to get all of the information about the case from her.
Peters then asked whether her attorneys tried to ask her what happened. She said she “tried to express it.”
“They were really short meetings,” Kehoe said of the sessions. “They were pressed for time. I guess it was maybe a half-hour at a time.”
Peters and Kehoe went through the method that Dryer would take in trial, deciding to go with an insanity defense. Kehoe received paperwork that described what it entailed.
“This is my first time dealing with legal jargon and the law,” Kehoe admitted. “A lot of it seemed very foreign to me.”
She added that she told her counsel that she wanted to testify in her own defense. She said her desire was either “minimized or to be discussed later,” she said on Thursday.
Peters then asked if there was ever a time she expressed her wish not to take the stand. She said she didn’t.
Kehoe detailed how she consulted with two psychiatrists during her preparations for trial the details of what happened. She also said that Dryer never went over reasons why Kehoe should not testify.
“I said that I needed to be able to share what I had experienced that day, Kehoe said. “I needed the jury to hear from me.”
She said that Dryer never gave her “a solid response” about her testimony.
“There was never really any real preparation for that,” Kehoe said. “We never really had an opportunity to discuss what questions she would ask and what specifics we would try to point out and what her approach would be. It was my continuous requests to be able to testify.”
She also admitted that on the third day of the trial she had told her attorneys that she does not want to testify.
In cross-examination, Assistant Attorney General Andrew Prosser asked why she ended up not testifying.
Kehoe said it “felt forced at that point.”
“I didn’t feel stable enough to testify,” she continued.
Prosser then asked what Kehoe thought she would have said that could have changed the outcome.
She reiterated her desire for the jury to hear in her own words what she had experienced.
“I needed the jury to hear that it was out of my control on that day,” she said.
“What do you mean out of your control on that day?” Prosser posed.
After a pause, Kehoe said she realized that the act she committed happened through her hands, but it wasn’t the “intention of my heart.”
“It would never have been an intention of a healthy mind,” she added.
Prosser brought up what Kehoe said in a deposition in 2009, namely, that she felt “possessed” by her step-father and how he abused her.
Kehoe countered that the word she used to describe her step-father’s influence on her was was “haunted.”
Prosser then pressed if Kehoe thought that her step-father was in control of her actions.
She replied that she would have conveyed that thought, but she didn’t feel stable enough on the day she was going to testify to do so.
When asked when she formulated the idea that she was out of control, Kehoe said it has always been her thoughts when she woke up in a state of psychosis.
“I have been in periods when my mental health has not been well enough that I had been able to express it,” she said. “I have grown healthier and healthier, I have been able to better able to put it into words.”
At this point, Prosser stopped her to ask if at the time of her trial she would or would not have been able to tell the jury of her step-father’s control.
She didn’t know, she said, but said she would have tried her best.
Prosser asserted that Kehoe never expressed to any of the five professionals who cared for her, four doctors and a counselor, that she felt her step-father controlled her.
She objected that that was inaccurate.
“I did try to convey, especially to Dr. [Marilyn] Hutchinson,” she said. “The best I could do is to say that he was there. My step-father was there. She didn’t know how to take that.”
However, Prosser said that the psychiatrists who examined Kehoe concluded she was legally insane at the time she killed her younger son.
“It’s not because you didn’t understand the nature and consequences of your acts… but you thought that those acts were good for a number of reasons,” he said. “Because of that, they formulated the opinion that you were legally insane.”
He then asked if Kehoe understood what that meant, which she said she did. He then asked if she’d agree with him that it’s not the same as being controlled by her step-father, which she didn’t.
“How is it that you think it would’ve been helpful having essentially stated the same story to at least four doctors to then get on the stand and say something completely different?” Prosser posed.
Kehoe said that she saw two of the doctors early on in the Buchanan County Jail and a third later on in the summer of 2009.
Prosser then asked if Dryer and Staudt’s strategy was to have her story told via experts and not call her to the stand so that Kehoe would be subjected to Prosser’s cross examination.
She said she didn’t think that was the case.
“She (Dryer) said, ‘Let the legal experts do their work,’” Kehoe remembered. “And they said your cross-examination would be brutal. But the middle portion of, ‘We don’t want you to contradict them,’ was not conveyed, no.”
Prosser said that when Dryer was deposed for the post-conviction-relief hearing, she said that avoiding his cross examination was her strategy.
Kehoe said that the deposition contained her former attorney’s memory, but not her own.
“Everything from that day was, to the best of my recollection, from eight years ago,” Kehoe said.
The prosecutor then stated that Kehoe may have been “relieved” after trial because she wasn’t “under stress of trial” once she was taken to the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Oakdale. She said her stress was that she was going into trial “unprepared.”
“I was trying to figure out how I was going to testify and pull this all together, all on my own,” she said. “It was part of my declining health.”
Prosser then pressed her to admit that once trial was over, the pressure was off.
However, Kehoe said there was “a whole new set of pressures” once she entered prison.
After Kehoe’s testimony, Peters, her attorney, and Judge Stochl went over the grounds of her petition that he would take under advisement.
They will include that the trial counsel failed to explain her right to testify, failed to call her to testify, failed to discuss the pros and cons of testifying, and didn’t adequately address the change of venue from Buchanan to Grundy County.
“Everybody raised their hand that they knew something about the case,” Peters said of the jury pool. “Other than legal arguments, there is no other evidence.”
Stochl noticed that a checkbox for constitutionality was marked and asked if that was “bootstrapped” into Kehoe’s due process rights. Peters said it was also for her testimony rights as well.
The judge said he will make his decision as soon as possible.
NOTICE THE DIRECT QUOTES – THE DETAIL IN THE STORY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF IT – VERY INFORMATIVE. I really enjoyed reading this – it’s good motivation to read a real life piece by my professor and a real life successful reporter on a national case. Kehoe’s interviews and quotes were very interesting and not anywhere else!
pursuit of diana 