Blind Faith (book) - The Marshall Murder Case

The Marshall Murder Case

According to Robert Marshall, on September 7, 1984, he and his wife Maria had pulled into a deserted picnic area on the way home from a recreational trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Marshall claimed that another driver pulled in behind them and that he was knocked unconscious while changing a tire. He awoke to find that his wife had been shot to death in the front seat of their car.

After a police investigation, Marshall was arrested on December 19, 1984. The prosecution theorized that Marshall had hired two men to kill his wife so that he could collect on a $1.5 million insurance policy. He was later convicted of the murder-for-hire and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was being administered unconstitutionally across America. Death penalty states enacted new statutes to comply with the strictures of this decision, New Jersey acting in 1982. The first 26 murderers whose death sentence reached the New Jersey Supreme Court got their sentences vacated on one ground or another. Marshall's was the first to be affirmed by the state's High Court, on January 24, 1991. The vote affirming the conviction was 6 to 1, and to uphold the death penalty phase was 5 to 2. The court's opinion was lengthy, and found errors, particularly in the guilt phase of the trial which, however, were found to be harmless, meaning there was no reasonable chance they affected the jury's verdict. There were later post-conviction proceedings in the state courts, and the N.J. Supreme Court wrote opinions in three other proceedings, including a so-called "proportionality" review that compares the appellant's culpability with others in death penalty cases.

U.S. District Court Judge Joseph E. Irenas ruled on April 8, 2004 in Camden, New Jersey that Marshall received ineffective assistance from his attorney during the death penalty phase of his trial. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision on November 2, 2005. On March 20, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office. On May 12, 2006, Prosecutor Thomas F. Kelaher declined to retry the death-penalty phase of the case, citing as reasons the difficulty in presenting evidence more than 20 years after the crime, and the probability of many more legal appeals should Marshall be sentenced to death again. With resentencing pending, Marshall faced a minimum of 30 years in prison (in which case he would have been released in 2014) and a maximum of life in prison with no possibility for release on parole before serving 30 years.

On August 18, 2006, Marshall was resentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole in eight years. This will make Marshall, incarcerated since his arrest, eligible for parole in 2014.

Until his removal from New Jersey’s death row, Marshall had been the longest-serving inmate there since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1982.