Idaho man not guilty of shooting terminally ill uncle
By Emanuella Grinberg
Court TV
(Court TV) -- An Idaho jury found Craig Perry not guilty Thursday of fatally shooting his cancer-stricken uncle in the back of the head more than three years ago.
"Mr. Perry, you are a free man," Second District Judge John Bradbury told the defendant after the Lewis County clerk read the jury's verdict.
Perry raised his hands in triumph and then hugged his supporters, including his longtime companion, Carol Flynn, who was present the afternoon of the shooting and testified during the trial.
"I owe you a beer," one of his supporters told him.
After two days of deliberations, 12 jurors in Nezperce, Idaho, sided with the 57-year-old carpenter, who claimed his terminally ill uncle shot himself to end his suffering from throat cancer.
"We're not disappointed with the decision," Lewis County elected prosecutor Kimron Torgerson told Court TV. "We believe that the decision was made based on the facts as they were given, and we felt it was a decision that needed to be made by the community."
At the time of his death, the defendant and Flynn were living with Robert Perry in his home in the remote Idaho town of Kamiah, Idaho.
The couple had come to town a month earlier to care for Craig Perry's uncle, with whom the defendant had a very close and paternal relationship, a fact numerous defense witnesses corroborated.
On March 29, 2001, Flynn called 911 to report the 83-year-old man had shot himself dead in the back bedroom of his tiny trailer.
Police initially ruled the sick man's shotgun death a suicide. Eight months later, the Idaho state attorney general's office filed second-degree murder charges against the carpenter from Pocatello, after opinions sought from forensic experts across the country suggested otherwise.
After Craig Perry was charged with second-degree murder, he passed a polygraph test about his version of the shooting. Although a lower court judge allowed the results into evidence, the ruling was tossed out on appeal in November 2003.
"I was a little disgusted at some of the expert testimony," said Perry's lawyer, James Siebe, "partly in view of the fact that Craig passed a polygraph test administered by one of the foremost experts in the country."
The prosecution called blood spatter expert Rod Englert to testify that the pattern of blood found on the defendant's pants was consistent with "blowback" blood ? blood from the shooting itself ? which would indicate Perry was standing near his uncle when the gun was fired.
But defense lawyers argued the spatter occurred before the shooting, when Robert Perry coughed up blood onto his nephew, as he sometimes did.
Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the chief medical examiner of Bexar County in San Antonio, Texas, who literally wrote the book on gunshot wounds, also testified that the circumstances surrounding Robert Perry's death were highly unusual for a suicide.
For one, there were two gunshots, not just one. Even more unusual, he testified, was the location of the wounds, just right to the midline in the back of his head.
"You could probably go to a bar and become an alcoholic by now, but I chose not to. I'm just glad it's over with," a tearful Perry told Court TV minutes after the verdict was delivered.
