Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 25, 1993 TAG: 9301250082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
POLICE OFFICER ON TRIAL AGAIN
A Winchester jury will be asked this week to decide whether former Lexington police officer Jerry Knick shot his wife in an accident or an act of hatred.It will be the second time that Knick faces a murder charge in connection with the death of Lisa Knick, a school psychologist who was shot in the head during an argument at their Lexington home nearly three years ago.
A Lexington jury found Knick guilty of second-degree murder in 1991. He began serving a 10-year prison term but was released a year later when the Virginia Court of Appeals ordered a new trial.
The appeals court ruled the Lexington judge should not have allowed testimony from Knick's previous wife, who may have prejudiced the jury when she told of unrelated threats Knick made to her some years earlier.
Because of extensive publicity and public attention the case has received, Knick's retrial was moved to Winchester Circuit Court.
The trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday with jury selection, and lawyers hope to have a verdict by the end of the week.
Although Knick was sentenced earlier to 10 years in prison, he now faces the maximum punishment for second-degree murder - 20 years.
David Natkin, a Lexington attorney who represents Knick, said last week that he expects the evidence at the retrial to be essentially the same as it was in 1991 - except for the lack of testimony by Deborah Gibson, Knick's ex-wife, that was ruled inadmissible.
Despite the appellate ruling, Gibson has been subpoenaed as a witness in the retrial. Robert Joyce, an assistant commonwealth's attorney who is assisting prosecutor Eric Sisler, declined to elaborate on Gibson's potential testimony.
At the first trial, Gibson was called as a rebuttal witness to challenge Knick's defense that the shooting was an accident. She testified that Knick, while in uniform, had threatened to shoot her with his service revolver in one of the arguments that ultimately led to their divorce.
Knick, 35, testified in 1991 that he accidentally shot his wife after she grabbed his service revolver during an argument at their home the night of Sept. 29, 1990.
Testimony showed that the argument was related to marital problems and that Knick also was angry that his wife had been seeking support from a black police officer on the force. Knick was on duty for the Lexington Police Department when he dropped by the house the night of the shooting.
He told the jury he pulled his weapon to scare his wife, and that it went off accidentally when she grabbed it. But Sisler argued that Lisa Knick was "used and abused by a man full of anger, full of prejudice, full of hate."