A state appeals court has affirmed the conviction of one of the seven defendants convicted of the 1990 murder of Brian Watkins, a tourist from Utah who was stabbed to death in a subway station.
The State Supreme Court's Appellate Division ruled 4-0 that a damaging statement by defendant Ricardo Nova, 19 at the time of the attack, was admissible at his trial. Nova and the other defendants are serving maximum sentences of 25 years to life in prison for the Sept. 2, 1990, killing.Nova's lawyer, David Touger, argued that the teenager gave his first oral statements to police without receiving Miranda warnings against self-incrimination. He also contended that subsequent written and videotaped statements had been tainted by the improperly given oral statements.
But the appeals court wrote in its decision Tuesday that Nova was not in police custody when he gave his first statement, that he had voluntarily accompanied police to the precinct stationhouse and that he never asked to call his parents or a lawyer in some 90 minutes of questioning before he received his Miranda warnings.
"In any event, defendant's videotape, taken 71/2 hours after defendant finished his second written statement, his final response to police questioning, is admissible, regardless of the admissibility of his morning (the initial) statements," the court wrote.
The court's decision upheld rulings at trial by Justice Edwin Torres. The appeals judges said in effect that even if the earliest statements were improperly received, the videotaped confession, which was properly received, established Nova's involvement in the gang's attack on the family.
The youth who was convicted of actually stabbing Watkins as he came to the defense of his mother was Yull Gary Morales.
The Watkins family was in New York City to attend the U.S. Open tennis championships at Forest Hills. They were in a subway station in the theater district and en route to Greenwich Village for dinner when the gang struck.