Casa man loses appeal to get new murder trial

A Casa man who was convicted of second-degree murder lost his appeal Wednesday.

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A.J. Cody, 28, had asked for a new trial and contended that the deputy prosecuting attorney who prosecuted his case behaved inappropriately, swaying the jury’s decision on witnesses’ credibility.

The Arkansas Court of Appeals rejected the appeal Wednesday, according to an opinion written by Judge Phillip Whiteaker.

Cody’s attorney, Debra Reece, could not be reached; she was out of the office until today, an office message system said.

Cody, who is serving a 20-year sentence, fatally shot Lee Britton, 65, of London in Pope County in May 2012.

Cody and his wife had separated, and the wife — with two of their children, a son, whose age was not listed in court documents, and a 5-year-old daughter — moved in with Britton, who “had previous ‘true’ findings for sexual assault from the Arkansas Department of Human Services,” according to the opinion.

A family service worker with the state agency was investigating a call from the home and learned of the living situation, telling the wife to remove the children from the home. The wife told Cody, who went to Britton’s home to pick up their son.

During the drive, Cody’s daughter told him that Britton had molested her, court records said. Cody confronted Britton when he got to the home, but Britton denied the allegation. The wife soon moved out and lived in motel rooms that Britton paid for, but she eventually moved back into the home.

On May 18, Cody dropped off the wife at Britton’s home, but she went to a neighbor’s because Britton wasn’t there at the time. Cody returned 20 minutes later with a 12-gauge shotgun and waited for the man to get home. Cody wrapped his shoes in plastic bags so he wouldn’t leave footprints and put on a long-sleeved shirt so he wouldn’t get blood on himself.

When Britton got home, Cody confronted him with the shotgun, asking again “why [Britton] molested” his daughter. Britton smiled and said, “That f*** little b* is lying,” prompting Cody to shoot him in the head, according to court documents. Cody made sure Britton was dead, picked up the shotgun shell and left.

In his appeal, Cody argued that the Pope County Circuit Court didn’t let the jury consider manslaughter as a lesser-included offense. The lower court found that there wasn’t any evidence that Britton provoked Cody to warrant the manslaughter instruction, according to the opinion.

And, Whiteaker wrote, “mere threats or menaces” aren’t provocative enough when the slain person was unarmed and not acting violently.

Cody also argued that during closing arguments of the original trial, the deputy prosecuting attorney grinned, laughed and rolled her eyes “to indicate the defense witnesses’ testimony was not credible,” the opinion states. He felt those actions swayed the jurors’ decision.

The Circuit Court decided that nothing was “serious enough” for the judge to grant a new trial.

“Here, the circuit court made factual findings that the jury was not distracted or influenced by the prosecuting attorney’s actions, and those findings were supported by the evidence introduced at the new-trial hearing,” Whiteaker wrote. “Cody failed to point to a single juror whose decision was swayed by the prosecutor’s conduct.”

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