News (AP) - Feds say convicted Michigan murderer deserves death

By Ed White Associated Press Writer DETROIT (AP) -- A man convicted of killing an armored-truck employee during a middle-of-the-night robbery fatally shot a "knight in shining armor" and deserves to die for his crime, a prosecutor said Monday as jurors began the death-penalty phase of a rare Michigan trial. Michigan outlawed capital punishment in 1846, but Timothy O'Reilly is being prosecuted in federal court where the death penalty is possible. O'Reilly last week was convicted of killing Norman "Anthony" Stephens, who was shot in the back and legs while stocking ATMs at Dearborn Federal Credit Union in Dearborn in 2001. The jury will decide whether O'Reilly, 37, gets life in prison or death, probably next week. A death sentence must be unanimous. "You all said it would be hard. It will be hard and it should be hard," Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Chadwell said in his opening remarks. "But we will demonstrate that it is just." Chadwell recounted some of the key points the government used to convict O'Reilly: that it was O'Reilly who "finished off" Stephens while the victim lay wounded on the ground; that O'Reilly showed no remorse in a secretly taped conversation in prison and that he expressed the desire to kill witnesses. Chadwell said the jury would get to know more about Stephens, 30, who was supporting his wife and six children with an $11-an-hour job. Stephens was a "knight in shining armor" when he married Robin Stephens, a single mother with three boys, in 1997, Chadwell said. He had a son from a previous relationship and the couple had two daughters of their own. Chadwell said Stephens wanted to take the family to Mississippi, his native state, and move into a house inherited from his late father, who died just a few weeks earlier. "But that was not to be," the prosecutor said in front of a large photo of Stephens as a young, handsome Boy Scout. "The dreams of Anthony Stephens and his family died on the cold, hard pavement in front of the Dearborn Federal Credit Union." O'Reilly kept his eyes down during Chadwell's 20-minute statement. Defense attorneys will have much flexibility in trying to persuade the jury to choose a life sentence. The evidence rules are different during the penalty phase and virtually everything is fair game, from O'Reilly's childhood to the punishment given others in the case. Defense attorney Richard Kammen said there would be testimony about a "serious brain abnormality" sustained by O'Reilly as a child and evidence that he grew up in a "harmful, abusive and destructive" home in Camarillo, Calif. O'Reilly moved to Michigan at the urging of Norman Duncan, a Detroit native and co-defendant in the bank slaying, Kammen said. "We're going to attempt to fill in the rest of the story," he told jurors. "How did this person come to be? How did this baby come to be this clueless, frightened, lonesome person?" There hasn't been a federal death sentence in Michigan since 2002, when Marvin Gabrion was convicted of killing a woman in a national forest. He is appealing. Published: Wed, Aug 11, 2010

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