Fille Photo
Dr. Toor and son
Jury selection in the trial of Dr. Lishan Wang is expected to get underway in April, roughly five years to the month since Dr. Wang is accused of gunning down Dr. Vanjinder Toor outside his Branford condo. Dr. Wang is accused of killing Dr. Toor a few years after a workplace dispute that ended Dr. Wang’s medical career.
Senior Superior Court Judge Thomas V. O’Keefe, Jr., the newly assigned trial judge in the case, asked Dr. Wang in court Friday if April would work for jury selection. Dr. Wang, who is indigent and is representing himself, said, “April sounds good.”
The judge is moving the proceedings along, now scheduling court dates every week or 10 days in an effort to try a case long overdue for processing in the criminal court system.
After saying April would work, Dr. Wang paused for a moment and in a rare reference to his family, who live in Georgia, said if his family were to get involved, school might not be over for his children. He and his wife have three children. After further discussion, Dr. Wang, 48, agreed to the April date.
In the years since the 2010 killing, no member of Dr. Wang’s family has ever appeared for a court session. He recently noted in court that his wife had divorced him.
Dr. Wang was arrested by Branford police on April 26, 2010, and charged with killing Dr. Toor, his former supervisor at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in New York, outside Dr. Toor’s Branford condo. The two men had a workplace dispute that eventually led to Dr. Wang’s firing in 2008. At the time of his death Dr. Toor was working as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Dr. Wang allegedly also shot at Dr. Toor’s wife, who was pregnant with their second child, but he missed. She is expected to testify at the trial.
Dr. Wang has insisted on representing himself in his murder trial, a decision that has led to years of delay. He was given permission by Superior Court Judge Roland D. Fasano in 2011 to represent himself after one set of psychiatrists found Dr. Wang competent to stand trial. Other psychiatrists disagreed, but the judge ruled for Dr. Wang.
Almost immediately the court system was faced with the issue of which division in the court system would fund the Wang case. Would the judiciary pay for Dr. Wang’s expert witnesses? Or would the public defender do so even though Dr. Wang had rejected their full-time defense?.
The funding issue sent the Wang case to the state Supreme Court for a ruling, which caused some of the delay in the case. In June, the state’s highest court ruled that indigent defendants are entitled to experts paid for by the state, in this case the public defender’s arm of the court system. Click here to read the story.
A Letter to the Judge
Five years is a long time to wait for a criminal trial. Some weeks ago, Tanjinder Toor, Dr. Toor’s younger brother, sent a letter to Superior Court Judge Patrick J. Clifford, urging that the case go to trial. Judge Clifford handled the pre-trial aspects of the case.
“This case has been going for more than four years now since we lost Vajinder, our loved one. We request for justice as this is more than a reasonable time now,” the letter said.
Senior State’s Attorney Eugene Calistro, Jr. gave the Toor family letter to Judge Clifford at the end of a pre-trial hearing in the judge’s 6th floor courtroom. Judge Clifford had previously announced he would transfer the case to Judge O’Keefe for trial.
Judge O’Keefe, a veteran trial judge, said he expected the trial to begin in May, after jury selection ends. He said he would take “the whole month” of April for jury selection, if necessary.
The Wang case is complicated on many levels, both with regard to evidence and procedure.
Because Dr. Wang has insisted on representing himself, he serves in a joint role: he is both a defendant facing a murder charge and he is a would-be “lawyer” representing himself to the court and to the jury.
And while he has a public defender stand-by attorney, Jeffrey Lapierre, Lapierre and his office have made it clear that he just that, a stand-by. He will answer a question or help in certain areas, for example, getting a list of expert witnesses. But Lapierre is not serving as a traditional defense attorney. He is not involved in strategy or presentation or overall defense.
That means, for example, that Dr. Wang will conduct jury selection himself. It also means that all conversations among the attorneys, (of which Dr. Wang is, in theory, one), are on-the-record at this trial.
Typically during a trial a question may come up that requires both attorneys to discuss the subject with the judge at the bench. This is a problem in this case because Dr. Wang, the defendant, would be giving information, possibly confidential information, to the prosecutor and to the judge, all in the course of acting as his own attorney. Actually this has already happened in certain Wang motions he delivered to the prosecutor.
Judge O’Keefe is aware of unexpected issues that may arise. The judge observed in court last Friday that he had to be very careful. He said he had talked to Judge Clifford “and he may be available for help if there is a conversation you do not want the trial judge to hear,” he told Dr. Wang, who appeared before him in his orange prison jumpsuit.
The judge, who has had 28 years of experience on the bench, told Dr. Wang in court “as you know when a person represents himself it’s a little harder.”
Lapierre said that while his office was willing to help Dr. Wang prepare for his trial by paying for computer use or other needs in preparing his case, the state’s Department of Corrections continues to resist.
Judge O’Keefe said the court would have to set up “working days” in the courthouse for Dr. Wang. He knew of the prior difficulties with the prison system. “You can’t just wave a magic wand,” he said, adding another way needed to be found.
Unresolved Legal Issues
Still to be resolved are a series of legal issues centering on subpoenas Dr. Wang wants served. Judge O’Keefe let Dr. Wang know that as a judge he has a supervisory role and he would make sure there was no abuse of the subpoena process.
“You want to subpoena the governor of the state. I’m not going to let you do that,” the judge said. Then the judge paused, feeling his way in this new defendant-attorney-judicial interplay, and added: “At least you will have to explain why.”
There is also the issue of expert witnesses Dr. Wang may want to call. First they need to be hired. Some are in-state; some may be out-of-state, which creates other issues. At Judge Clifford’s last court hearing in October, Lapierre informed the judge he had run into difficulty obtaining certain experts, but since the case has been transferred to Judge O’Keefe, there appears to be some movement.
Judge Clifford has already approved Dr. Wang’s motions regarding expert witnesses in a variety of areas, including ballistics, DNA, gunshot residue, the medical examiner’s autopsy report, the GPS navigation system, psychiatric evaluation, and certain out-of-state subpoena requests.
It is still not clear what Dr. Wang’s defense will be but he has said he will need a psychiatric expert. At some point that information will become part of the court record.
More motions
As he has in virtually all of his court appearance, Dr. Wang submitted a bulging packet of motions to the judge. He works on them from his prison cell and has submitted hundreds of them. Most have been turned down.
“I have lots of motions,” Dr. Wang said.
“Want to take some back?” the judge asked Dr. Wang, smiling. Dr. Wang smiled, too, but didn’t take the judge up on his offer.
“We can talk about these motions all day,” the judge said, referring to Nov. 25, the next court date set in the case. The judge told Dr. Wang he had set aside the entire day.
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