Case dropped, men charged in officer’s death to be released

Two ex-convicts arrested a year ago and charged with murdering an Orange County Sheriff’s Department sergeant who died 30 years after he was shot are being released from custody after Orange County prosecutors announced Thursday they are unable to proceed with their case because of an appellate court decision.

Co-defendants David Michael Knick and Robert Duston Strong were convicted in 1981 of the attempted murder of deputy Ira Essoe, who was paralyzed after he was shot while investigating a car burglary Nov. 6, 1980. Both men served several years in prison on that case before they were paroled in the 1990s.

But when Essoe died in February 2010 after battling health issues related to the shooting 30 years earlier, the Orange County Coroner’s Office determined that the cause of death was the result of being shot twice, including one shot that severed his spinal code.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office then charged Knick and Defense attorneys Frederick Fascenelli and Dan Greenburg argued in motions in Orange County Superior Court that the penal code as it existed in 1980, when the crime was committed, barred a murder prosecution if the victim did not die within three years and one day of being injured Essoe died nearly 30 years after he was shot in the parking lot of the Orange Mall.

Prosecutors, however, contended that there is no statute of limitations for murder and noted that the law changed in the 1997 to remove the barrier.

Superior Court Judge Frank Fasel agreed with the District Attorney’s Office when he ordered Knick and Strong to stand trial for murder after hearing evidence at a preliminary hearing in April But the 4th District Court of Appeal reversed Fasel in a 3-0 ruling, finding that charging Strong and Knick with murder under the theory that the death of Essoe in February 2010 was the result of injuries he sustained nearly three decades earlier was a violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights. The justices based their ruling on the law as it existed in 1980, saying the defendants had to be held to the standards of the law when the crime was committed.

Deputy District Attorney Keith Bogardus then filed a writ with the California Supreme Court. When the justices recently declined to review the case, Bogardus said his office could no longer proceed with the prosecution.