State police violated teen murder suspect Cody Lee’s constitutional rights when they seized from his home a backpack and notebook containing a hit list detailing a grisly crime spree, defense lawyers argued in motions filed today.
Cody Lee is accused of shooting his 80-year-old great-grandfather, Herbert Lee, in the head with a .222-caliber rifle in December 2009, when Cody Lee was 15.
The day of the slaying, state police interviewed a classmate of Lee’s, who told them Lee had shown him a black three-ring notebook containing a to-do list with entries including “kill grandpa” and “kill dad,” according to the defense motions filed by attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. and co-counsel.
At a preliminary hearing in January, Trooper Christopher King testified he knew the list was in a notebook in Cody Lee’s backpack, according to the motions.
But despite that knowledge, King filed for the warrant to search the Lees’ Lake Township home the next day and mentioned paper documents, but not a black notebook or black backpack, the motions say.
“The words “Black Back Pack,” or any derivative thereof, are totally, completely, and 100% absent from the words contained within the four corners of the Affidavit,” the lawyers wrote.
The search warrant inventory lists the black backpack containing a black ring notebook that was found on the floor of Cody Lee’s room — a “clear, indisputable, and completely uncorrectable violation” of criminal procedure and Cody Lee’s constitutional protection against unreasonable searches, the lawyers argue. As a result, the backpack, notebook and the deadly to-do list should be suppressed, the motions say.
Cody Lee’s lawyers are also seeking to suppress any statements Cody Lee made to psychiatrist Steven R. Kafrissen, M.D., while he was jailed at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility.
Prosecutors did not immediately answer the motions.
Defense lawyers have already succeeded in having Cody Lee’s statements to police after the shooting suppressed, saying his judgment had been clouded from fleeing his home and roaming through the woods in the near-freezing cold for eight hours before police caught him.
The case against Cody Lee was briefly dismissed following the hearing in January, when Magisterial District Judge James Tupper ruled prosecutors hadn’t met their burden of proof. Police immediately rearrested Lee and Magisterial District Judge Paul Roberts forwarded the homicide charge to trial in February.
Lee is scheduled to stand trial as an adult on an open count of homicide in September.
jhalpin@citizensvoice.com; 570-821-2058