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Home > Blogs > Dayton Courts: Legal and crime news > Archives > 2009 > September > 04 > Entry
Convict who faked heart attack during trial loses on appeal
DAYTON — Keison Wilkins, who faked a heart attack while representing himself in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court last year, has lost his appeal.
Wilkins, 34, argued that Judge Mary Katherine Huffman should have declared a mistrial because his collapse adversely affected his right to represent himself. The Ohio 2nd District Court of Appeals disagreed, in a decision released Friday, Sept. 4, citing case law that trial judges can terminate self-representation by a defendant who deliberately obstructs the proceedings.
Huffman sentenced Wilkins June 30, 2008 to 42 years in prison after he was convicted of two counts of felonious assault, being a felon in possession of a weapon, firing a gun into a habitation and of being a repeat violent offender.
The sentencing capped a week of Wilkins’ antics, which frequently caused Huffman to clear her courtroom. The video of Wilkins’ collapse was viewed far beyond the Miami Valley on websites and television programs.
Rejecting all of Wilkins’ arguments, the appeals court found that: — Wilkins could not claim that he failed to represent himself properly, since it was his decision to act as his own attorney. — That the evidence presented was sufficient for and consistent with the jury’s verdict. — That Huffman acted properly in imposing an additional 10 years to Wilkins sentence, due to the repeat violent offender specification. — that Huffman did not abuse her discretion by failing to exclude the testimony of William Prigmore, a prosecution witness. Wilkins argued that his rights were violated because the prosecution only gave him four days notice before the trial that Prigmore would testify, but the appeals court found that the “prosecutor disclosed Prigmore in a reliable and expedient manner, to both the trial court and Wilkins.”
Near the end of the trial, Wilkins stood up and said “excuse me a second, I need some time, before falling to the floor. Huffman immediately removed the jury from the courtroom. Paramedics and a nurse quickly determined Wilkins was not ill.
“The record will reflect that the jury is not present,” Huffman said. “The defendant is present and is feigning some medical condition.”
Prosecutors called a nurse from the county jail, a deputy with some medical training and a paramedic to the stand who to testify that there was nothing wrong with Wilkins, who was then slumped in a chair with his eyes closed.
“Record should reflect that the defendant is slouching over to the side and acts like he’s sleeping,” Huffman said.
When a deputy put an ammonia stick under his nose Wilkins responded, opened his eyes, then went back to feigning unconsciousness.
“Oh, a remarkable change,” Huffman said.
As Wilkins would not respond or participate, Huffman eventually ordered him removed from the courtroom.
Wilkins, who has an eighth-grade education, represented himself in a different case in March 2005 when a jury acquitted him of felonious assault. But a judge convicted him of being a felon in possession of a weapon.
The June 2008 trial was the second time Wilkins had been tried on charges that he tried to shoot Reginald Brooks on April 28, 2004, outside a Faulkner Avenue home Brooks owned. In January 2005, two months before his successful defense in the other case, Wilkins was represented by an attorney and convicted.
The appeals court overruled the convictions from the January 2005 trial, sending it back to Huffman’s court for re-trial. The appeals court found Wilkins’ attorney was ineffective for failing to object to Reginald Brooks’ hearsay testimony that someone told him that Wilkins had been hired to kill him.
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