Machete killer’s appeal denied

PALMER — Christopher Erin Rogers Jr., who made headlines in 2007 for a brutal and fatal machete attack, lost an appeal of his conviction in a ruling released Friday.

Rogers was arrested in December 2007 after he attacked and killed his father with a machete and grievously wounded his father’s fiancée, Elann Moren, before fleeing to Anchorage in a stolen pickup and shooting three people there, killing one — Jason Wenger, 27.

Rogers was eventually found guilty of murder at separate jury trials in Anchorage and Palmer. When added together, the Anchorage and Palmer convictions netted Rogers sentences of more than 498 years in prison.

In the Palmer case, his unsuccessful defense was that he attacked his father and Moren, but didn’t intend to kill them. He appealed that conviction on two grounds:

• The prosecutor in the case, Roman Kalytiak, improperly asked the jury to rule based on sympathy for Rogers’ victims.

• Superior Court Judge Vanessa White should have given him more time to get a California psychiatrist to testify at his sentencing hearing.

Neither of those claims had any weight, Alaska Court of Appeals Justice David Mannheimer wrote in Friday’s ruling. About the sympathy argument, Rogers had a point regarding Kalytiak’s arguments to the jury, Mannheimer wrote. The judge quoted transcripts of what Kalytiak said:

“True, you’re not supposed to use sympathy in your decision, but you have seen direct evidence in this case of how much sympathy the defendant showed for his father and his father’s fiancée,” Kalytiak said in the transcripts. “You have seen how much mercy he showed them. Ask yourself: does he deserve any mercy?”

Mannheimer wrote that the statement was improper.

“This was a blatant invitation for the jurors to disregard their duty to hold the state to its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt — a request for the jurors to decide the issue of the defendant’s culpable mental state, not based on the evidence, but rather on the jurors’ sympathy for the victims and a desire for retribution,” the judge wrote.

Kalytiak also repeatedly told the jury Rogers is a “bad man.”

“The fact that Rogers might be a bad man is irrelevant,” Mannheimer wrote. “Bad people can be accused of crimes without sufficient proof — and, in such cases, it’s the jury’s duty to find them not guilty.”

Still, to prove that the statements constitute enough error to overturn his conviction, Rogers would have to show that his own attorney, John Richard, should have objected to the statements and that he had no good reason for not doing so.

But Richard did have a good reason. He chose to use those statements against Kalytiak. Again Mannheimer quotes the transcripts:

“Erin Rogers is not charged with being a ‘bad man,’” Richard told the jury. “He’s charged with doing a bad thing.”

Richard went on to say, “The state’s overreaching (includes) obvious efforts to elicit sympathy for the victims — which, of course, they deserve — but it doesn’t have any role at all in your deciding this case.”

So the appeals court denied that appeal point. The second point, about the time for sentencing, Mannheimer dispatched with much less effort. Essentially, the judge ruled that Rogers’ defense team had ample time to get its expert qualified to testify in Alaska without risk of him getting charged criminally with practicing without a license (his license was only for California, not Alaska). White gave Rogers most of a year to get his case together, and Rogers couldn’t show he put forth the proper effort getting this psychiatrist to testify.

“Rogers’s attorney gave the superior court no information about the efforts (if any) he made … to have (the doctor) obtain a temporary permit to practice medicine in Alaska or to have Rogers evaluated by another psychiatrist,” Mannheimer says in his ruling.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.