DATE: Wednesday, July 23, 1997              TAG: 9707230632

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY PAUL NOWELL, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: WINSTON-SALEM                     LENGTH:   68 lines

ATTORNEY TESTIFIES ABOUT JUDGE'S CONTACT WITH JURY IN MOORE TRIAL

Wearing a Darth Vader mask to a Halloween gathering with jurors. Posing for snapshots with jury members. Sharing birthday cake and popcorn.

These were some of the allegations levied Tuesday by condemned killer Blanche Taylor Moore's attorneys in Forsyth County Superior Court about the judge who presided over her 1990 trial.

Moore's attorneys are asking Judge William Wood to order a new trial, partly because of Judge William Freeman's alleged contact with jury members during the sensational murder trial seven years ago.

David Tamer, who represented Moore at the trial and worked on her appeal, was on the witness stand on the second day of a hearing on her request for a new trial. She was convicted of killing her boyfriend in 1986 by lacing his food with arsenic.

Moore is attending the hearing, which is expected to last through Wednesday.

Tamer testified he was advised not to bring up potential judicial misconduct during the trial so that issue could be used on appeal.

On one occasion during the trial, Freeman emerged from the jury room with a piece of birthday cake and a bag of popcorn, Tamer said.

Tamer testified under questioning by Barry McNeill of the state Attorney General's Office. He later answered questions from William Taylor, who is representing Moore at the hearing.

Several weeks before he witnessed Freeman leaving the jury room, Tamer said he walked up to defense attorneys who were talking in a hallway about another incident involving the judge and the jury.

``Doesn't that damn fool know what he's doing,'' Tamer recalled one of the other lawyers saying at the time.

The two other lawyers had seen Freeman leaving the jury room. ``The three of us readily agreed Judge Freeman had no business having any contact with the jury at all,'' he said.

Tamer left the courthouse and went to another lawyer's office. He called the Office of the Appellate Defender in Raleigh, which advised him not to bring up the issue so it could be used on appeal.

His testimony is important because Taylor argued Monday that not only did Freeman act improperly, but that Moore's lawyers were prevented from appealing her conviction for that reason because the allegation was not part of the official trial record.

In arguing against a new trial, McNeill said Moore's attorneys were aware of the interaction between the judge and the jury but never brought it up in court.

McNeill said defense attorneys contacted the appellate defender's office and were advised ``not to do anything - to keep it in their pocket.''

Moore was convicted in the 1986 death of boyfriend Raymond Reid of Kernersville. She was arrested after doctors determined three years later that her current husband, the Rev. Dwight Moore, was suffering from arsenic poisoning.

Investigators exhumed Reid's body and also the body of Moore's first husband, James N. Taylor, and determined both had died from arsenic poisoning.

Blanche Taylor Moore was charged with two counts of murder and an assault charge in the case of Dwight Moore, who survived. The district attorney dropped the assault charge and the second murder charge after a judge sentenced Moore to death for Reid's murder.

The defense also claims that Tamer was suffering from depression and didn't defend Moore as well as he should have in her trial.

Tamer's law license was suspended for at least three years in 1994. The State Bar found that he lied to clients, neglected their cases and kept fees for services that he did not perform. KEYWORDS: MURDER APPEAL DEATH SENTENCE

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