Tuite's future may be decided Wednesday

By: TERI FIGUEROA - Staff Writer | Monday, August 23, 2004 9:02 PM PDT ∞

Come Wednesday, yet another chapter in the lengthy, complex case surrounding the slaying death of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe may draw to a close.

Richard Tuite, the mentally ill transient convicted of voluntary manslaughter three months ago in the 1998 killing, is set to be sentenced Wednesday.

Then again, Tuite may not be sentenced at all. It's possible the judge will grant Tuite's attorney's requests to give their client a new trial.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Frederic Link, who oversaw Tuite's trial, has said he plans to rule on the defense's requests for a new trial this Wednesday. If he rejects their arguments, he has said he plans to sentence Tuite that day.

Tuite, 35, faces up to 13 years in prison if he is given the maximum sentence for Stephanie's death. The Hidden Valley Middle School seventh-grader was found in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor in her Escondido home on Jan. 21, 1998.

Stephanie's mother, Cheryl Crowe, said the family is anxious about the upcoming hearing, and are hoping Tuite will be sentenced.

"It's frustrating," Cheryl Crowe said Monday.

"It just keeps going on and on," she said. "We won't get our daughter back, but maybe justice will be served. I'm hoping the justice system will respect the jury's verdict. The jury has spoken. They saw the evidence, came to a verdict and that is it."

Tuite's family maintains that he is innocent, and that his illness ---- he suffers from schizophrenia ---- made him an easy target for conviction.

Tuite's attorneys have raised a number of issues for Link to consider when deciding on a new trial.

In asking for new proceedings, defense attorneys Brad Patton and William Fletcher cited claims of new evidence and the possibility that the jury relied on unauthorized evidence when it convicted Tuite.

Since Tuite's conviction, lawyers from both sides have disclosed that two unauthorized charts ---- one created by the defense, the other by prosecutors ---- ended up in the hands of the jury during its deliberations.

How the charts got in to the jury room is not known.

Tuite's attorneys argue that the jury's use of the charts tainted the verdict. One of the jurors has said the information he gleaned from a chart persuaded him to vote to convict.

Prosecutors have argued that under the law Link can't consider any juror's state of mind when making his decision on whether to grant a new trial.

Then there's the question of the late discovery of tiny smears of Stephanie's blood found on a white T-shirt police confiscated from Tuite on the day the child's body was found.

More than five years passed before anyone noticed the small smears near the hem of the shirt, and the test results that revealed it to be Stephanie's blood came less than two months before the trial began.

Link denied defense requests to postpone the trial until it could further investigate the find.

Tuite's attorneys argue they simply had no time to dig into the new evidence because they had their hands full with a more-than-three-month trial that had about 170 witnesses.

It wasn't until after the verdict, Tuite's attorney Patton has said, that they had time to investigate the blood.

They argue they now have an expert who says the blood on Tuite's white T-shirt could be the result of accidental contamination after Tuite came into contact with police who'd been at the bloody crime scene.

Prosecutors counter that both sides addressed the contamination issue during the trial.

Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 740-3517 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.