Ersland takes case to yet another court
SAY this for Jerome Ersland — he’s willing to try just about anything to prove his innocence, as he’s doing with his latest appeal. Ersland, 66, is locked up at the North Fork Correctional Center in Sayre, where he’s serving a life term for first-degree murder. An Oklahoma County jury found him guilty in the 2009 shooting of an unarmed teenager who tried to rob the south Oklahoma City pharmacy where Ersland worked.
The case carried a high profile, because District Attorney David Prater filed the murder charge even though it initially was believed Ersland had simply defended his business, and two co-workers, against gun-wielding intruders.
That narrative remained, and Prater came under considerable public criticism, even after security video showed that after wounding one of the would-be robbers, leaving him motionless on the ground, Ersland retrieved a second gun from a drawer and fired five more rounds into the teenager.
Ersland also was found to have told several lies to investigators, including that both intruders had guns when only one did.
His recent filing with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver is his fourth bite at the apple.
In unsuccessfully asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn his murder conviction, Ersland claimed, among other things, that his legal counsel at the time — longtime defense attorney Irven Box — never told him prosecutors were willing to consider a plea deal to a lesser charge such as manslaughter.
(Among those touting Ersland’s innocence at that time was former state Sen. Ralph Shortey, who said there was “no doubt that this was ineffective assistance of counsel.” Shortey had no experience in the law but certainly does today, as he sits in jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2017 to child sex trafficking.)
In another appeal, a different attorney suggested Ersland may have had a mental disorder that affected his judgment on the day of the shooting.
Ersland followed that unsuccessful effort with an appeal in Oklahoma City federal court, arguing he didn’t get a fair trial because his attorneys didn’t properly investigate facts that would have uncovered “powerful and highly relevant circumstantial evidence” supporting his defense.
Among other things, in that appeal he said post-traumatic stress disorder caused him to suppress memories of what happened, and that he now remembered he had a second gun in his pocket, not in a counter drawer — even though the security video clearly showed him getting the second gun from the drawer.
U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton ruled against Ersland in September, noting that, “Nothing on the tapes supports petitioner’s new assertion that the gun came from his pocket” and that Ersland’s history of being untruthful “casts a large shadow” on his claim of newly discovered evidence.
Ersland is now seeking relief from the Denver appeals court, and the filing rehashes many of the claims Heaton rejected.
“Rather than a product of memory recall, petitioner’s new evidence is most likely another attempt to justify his criminal action,” Heaton wrote. That would certainly be par for the course for Jerome Ersland.