Jury returns first-degree murder verdict in 35 minutes
A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury took all of 35 minutes Thursday before finding Omar Sharif Cash guilty of first-degree murder in the 2008 execution-style slaying of a 19-year-old man outside a Frankford car wash.
The jury of 10 women and two men returned to court at about 2:15 p.m. and, in an silent courtroom, announced the verdict that could result in a death penalty against the 31-year-old Cash.
Judge Sandy L.V. Byrd dismissed the jury until Tuesday - after Monday's Veterans' Day holiday - when it will begin hearing evidence to decide if Cash should be sentenced to death by lethal injection or life in prison without chance of parole.
Cash had become almost legendary in law enforcement for escaping conviction. A 2009 Inquirer series detailed how a rape case was dismissed when the victim failed to appear at trial. An attempted-murder case failed when the victim hanged himself. A robbery case sank when the alleged victim, wanted on a drug charge, became a fugitive.
Defense attorneys Lee Mandell and Earl G. Kauffman said they would not comment on the verdict.
Cash, who on Wednesday testified in his defense, exhibited no obvious emotion at the verdict. In his testimony, Cash admitted that on April 21, 2008 he shot Muliek Ronald Brown in the back of the head as Brown polished the wheel rims of his Mercury Marquis outside Winning Edge Car Wash on Frankford Avenue.
Cash maintained he shot Brown because it was a case of "kill or be killed." Cash said Brown and other members of a local gang had shot at and were hunting him.
"I was trying to avoid getting killed myself, this was how I'm going to protect myself," Cash said, adding, "I didn't want to have to keep ducking and hiding from these people."
Assistant District Attorneys Carlos Vega and Peter Lim called Cash's version of events a "fabrication" and an excuse to give the jury a reason not to find him guilty of first-degree murder.
Prosecutors said Brown had no juvenile or adult criminal history, was unarmed, worked full-time and was married and the father of a young son.
"This was not just a murder, this was an execution," Lim told the jury in his closing argument.
Lim argued that the fact that Cash sneaked up behind Brown and shot him in the head and then fled to New York City proved he was guilty of a premeditated malicious killing.
"His intent was not just beyond a reasonable doubt, it was beyond all doubt," Lim said.
Mandell argued that the eyewitness identifications and forensic evidence might have provided a basis for a defense had not Cash testified.
"None of this matters now because Omar Cash admitted he shot Muliek Brown," Mandell told the jury.
Instead, Mandell argued that the killing was a result of the "code of the streets" in a poor, crime-plagued neighborhood of the city.
"To decide this case you have to get inside the head and mind of Omar Cash," Mandell added. "Think hard and then you have to decide what kind of responsibility he must bear for what he did."
Cash's streak of escaping convictions ran out in 2010 when a Bucks County jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in the May 2008 kidnapping and killing of an immigrant carpenter - shot and dumped along a Bensalem highway - and the repeated rape of the victim's 41-year-old female companion, who later escaped from a Lawrenceville, N.J., motel.
The Bucks jury spared his life and Cash was sentenced to life without parole for murder.
Cash testified in his defense in that trial too. He denied killing the man and said the woman was a prostitute he met at the motel through an acquaintance who was a pimp.
The latest jury did not hear about the earlier cases during the trial but will on Tuesday when prosecutors begin making their case for the death penalty.
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