Cop killer fires lawyers prior to sentencing
Fricke found guilty for death of Matthew Rittner
Two weeks before his scheduled sentencing for killing a Milwaukee police officer during a raid on his apartment, Jordan Fricke has fired his attorneys.
A jury found Fricke guilty July 11 for the February shooting death of Matthew Rittner, who had just battered a hole in Fricke’s door as part of a tactical team serving a no-knock search warrant.
He faces a mandatory life term, but Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Wagner does have discretion about whether to make Fricke eligible to seek supervised release at some point.
But Fricke won’t go to that hearing with his trial attorneys, Michael Chernin and Patricia Bradford, a Marquette Law School professor. The pair moved to withdraw as Fricke’s counsel this week, saying they had met with him on Sunday and that he was adamant he no longer wanted their representation.
Chernin wrote that he believes the “attorney-client relationship is irretrievably broken.”
Wagner granted the motion Wednesday but stayed his order until another hearing Thursday on whether the a public defender will take over as Fricke’s counsel.
Fricke said he thought he was being attacked by a street gang the day of the shooting. After firing four shots, he dropped his gun and surrendered when he said he realized what he thought were intruders were really the police.
Other officers testified they yelled “Milwaukee police. Search warrant” several times while entering Fricke’s building and climbing the stairs to his upper duplex apartment. They were investigating possible marijuana sales and said they used extra force because they believed Fricke also had guns.
He did, all legally possessed. He told the jury he bought the shortened assault-style weapon he fired at police in 2013 for protection after friends and neighbors had been subjects of home invasions, including one in which the perpetrators pretended to be the police.
But the jury took little more than an hour to convict Fricke, rejecting options to find him guilty of lesser offenses such as second-degree intentional homicide or first-degree reckless homicide.
He was also convicted of recklessly endangering the safety of another officer and of maintaining a drug trafficking place.
Fricke’s case moved from charges to trial relatively quickly. He was the only defense witness, and the only substantive pretrial motion by the defense was to exclude evidence of two small sales of marijuana to a police informant, which was denied.
Citing the extensive publicity around the case, the defense also sought to have jurors sequestered during the trial. Wagner denied that motion.