Defense in child’s slaying urges court to scrutinize expert witness

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The defense team for a D.C. woman convicted in the brutal slaying of a 2-year-old girl urged an appellate panel Wednesday to compare their client’s case with a Wisconsin murder conviction that was tossed because an expert witness lied.

In a motion filed with the D.C. Court of Appeals, attorneys for Angela O’Brien said the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week ruled that false testimony by prosecution witness Saami Shaibani invalidated a guilty finding in a homicide case.

Shaibani was also an expert witness against O’Brien when she was convicted of murdering Brianna Blackmond, a case that triggered widespread changes in D.C.’s child welfare system.

But one juror, Charles Cerf, told The Examiner on Sunday that the jury probably wouldn’t have found O’Brien guilty without Shaibani’s testimony.

Wisconsin’s highest court overturned the murder conviction of Douglas Plude, who was serving life for allegedly poisoning his wife and drowning her in a toilet. “[H]ad the jury heard Shaibani’s misrepresentation about his credentials, it would have had a reasonable doubt as to Plude’s guilt,” the judges wrote.

Defense attorney Joanne Slaight raised the issue about false credentials during O’Brien’s murder trial in 2001, but D.C. Superior Court Judge Lee Satterfield refused to let jurors hear evidence questioning his resume, according to court records.

Since then, courts from South Dakota to North Carolina have tossed out the testimony of Shaibani after concluding his claim that he was a clinical associate professor at Temple University was false.

Satterfield cannot comment because the O’Brien appeal case is pending, a spokeswoman said. In denying a new trial, Satterfield wrote that it was not conclusive that Shaibani lied under oath and that it was unlikely that the jurors would have reached a different verdict without Shaibani’s testimony.

Shaibani’s career as a professional witness came to a spectacular end on Court TV during the 2003 murder trial of author Michael Peterson in North Carolina. Peterson attorney David Rudolf read a letter from Temple University he had obtained from Slaight the night before. That letter was one of the pieces of evidence that Slaight said Satterfield wouldn’t allow in his court.

“Any claim by Mr. Shaibani that he is now a member of, or even affiliated with, the Temple University Department of Physics is fraudulent,” read the September 2001 letter from the Temple physics chair. The judge promptly ruled that Shaibani had committed perjury and instructed the jury to disregard everything the witness had said.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com