A convicted killer will get a new trial — because a Miami-Dade court stenographer accidentally erased the transcript of his murder trial.
In an unusual case, an appeals court last week threw out the conviction and life sentence of Randy Chaviano, 26, who was convicted by a jury in July 2009 of fatally shooting a man at his Hialeah duplex.
Chaviano had appealed his conviction, but because hardly any transcripts of the proceedings existed, the Third District Court of Appeal ordered that he get a new chance to go before jurors.
“The overturning of a murder conviction always means terrible pain for the victim’s family and frustration for prosecutors and police officers,” said Miami-Dade State Attorney’s spokesman Ed Griffith. “Overturning a murder conviction because of a court reporter’s problem creates a brand new level of pain and frustration.”
The news comes at a sensitive time for Florida court reporters, who have been resisting moves to replace courtroom stenographers with digital recorders to capture the words of judges, lawyers, defendants and witnesses.
During the past year, the 11th Judicial Circuit has wired all the courtrooms at Miami-Dade’s criminal courthouse. In the next few months, five courtrooms at Miami-Dade’s criminal courthouse will begin using digital recorders during the daily morning calendar sessions.
Court reporters in criminal court have also complained that plunging rates paid by the state have driven away experienced stenographers and forced firms to hang on to aging equipment.
Because of her goof in this case and others, court reporter Terlesa Cowart was fired from her firm, Goldman Naccarato Patterson Vela Associates Inc. Cowart could not be reached for comment.
At the trial, jurors heard that Hialeah police accused Chaviano of murdering Carlos Acosta, who had come to his duplex to buy drugs in September 2005.
During a heated confrontation, police said, Chaviano shot and killed Acosta, and later planted a gun on the dead man’s body.
During the eight-day trial, defense attorney Israel Encinosa argued that Chaviano indeed acted in self-defense but only planted the gun when he and relatives panicked after the shooting.
Jurors didn’t buy the argument, convicting Chaviano of second-degree murder with a weapon and armed drug dealing. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge David Miller sentenced him to life in prison.
Appealed
As most convicted killers do, Chaviano chose to appeal the conviction. His lawyers wanted to argue that an associate medical examiner testified improperly, and that there was not enough evidence to show that the shooting happened outside the premises of the duplex.
“Hopefully, I will get to try it again,” Encinosa said of the new trial. “I think I can win it this time. It was an injustice that was done. When somebody comes to your house, you should be able to defend yourself.”
He’ll get that chance, thanks to Cowart.
No paper
Most stenographers use machines that capture their work on both paper and an internal disc.
But in Cowart’s case, according to her former employer, she had a habit of not bringing enough of the special rolls of paper used to chronicle the proceedings. At Chaviano’s trial, she again failed to capture the trial on paper, according to a courts spokeswoman.
Afterward, Cowart erased the data from the stenography machine’s memory disc, but not before transferring it to her computer. But then a virus struck her computer, wiping out all her notes.
Lawyers in the case could only muster up a transcript of one key pretrial hearing and the closing arguments. “The rest is lost forever,” defense attorney Harvey Sepler wrote in court documents.
Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/01/2569743/hialeah-killer-gets-new-trial.html
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