James Jerold Koedatich was a Morristown, New Jersey, man with a 1971 Florida conviction for second-degree murder when two young women from Morris County were killed two weeks apart at the end of 1982. Amie Hoffman, 18, a high school cheerleader from Parsippany, died in November. Deirdre O'Brien, 25, died in December. Koedatich was arrested after he called the police himself to report that he had been stabbed, and he was later convicted of both murders.
A Morris County jury condemned him to death for the Hoffman murder in October 1984. The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the conviction but threw out the death sentence in 1988, and two years later the same court divided 4 to 3 over how a second penalty jury should be allowed to judge him. The case became an early test of how New Jersey's Capital Punishment Act should treat a jury that could not agree.
Only a short sketch of Koedatich emerged at the time of his arrest. United Press International described him as 34 years old, a resident of Morristown who lived with his mother and stepfather, and the superintendent of an apartment complex in Wharton, another Morris County town. Details of his childhood and schooling have not been reported.
He already had a murder conviction. The New Jersey Supreme Court's 1990 opinion records that he had been convicted of second-degree murder in Florida in 1971, a conviction prosecutors later used against him as an aggravating factor in the New Jersey death penalty case. That opinion gives no other detail of the Florida crime, the victim or the sentence he served there.
Amie Hoffman was 18, a senior and a cheerleader at Parsippany Hills High School, according to United Press International and the New Jersey Supreme Court.
On November 23, 1982, she was abducted in Cedar Knolls. Two days later, on Thanksgiving Day, her body was found in Randolph Township. The Supreme Court's 1990 opinion records that she was stabbed to death.
Deirdre O'Brien was 25. On December 5, 1982, two weeks after Amie Hoffman disappeared, she was abducted in Morris Township. She was stabbed and died in a hospital in Hackettstown, in neighboring Warren County. Before she died she was able to describe her attacker to investigators, United Press International reported.
The New Jersey Supreme Court spelled her first name "Diedre" in its 1990 opinion. The wire report of the arrest used "Deirdre".
The break in the case came from Koedatich himself. On a Sunday night, the Morris County prosecutor, Lee Trumbull, later told reporters, Koedatich called the Morristown police and said that his car had been pulled over not far from where Deirdre O'Brien had been abducted, and that he had been stabbed. He was treated at Morristown General Hospital.
According to Trumbull, township police checked the scene and examined the car. "A subsequent investigation revealed facts sufficient to arrest Koedatich for the Deirdre O'Brien murder," the prosecutor said. Koedatich was arrested on the Tuesday, after he was released from the hospital.
He was charged with murdering Deirdre O'Brien and held in the Warren County jail on $250,000 bail, according to Howard McGinn, the prosecutor who announced the bail figure. McGinn, Trumbull and Colonel Clinton Pagano, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, held a joint news conference about the arrest. Pagano said there was no evidence that Koedatich and Deirdre O'Brien had known each other. Trumbull told the public that "any fears that arose as a result of the Deirdre O'Brien killing can be allayed."
The arrest came at a time of alarm in Morris County. At the news conference the three officials declined to link Deirdre O'Brien's death to four other recent killings in the county: two women, a man and a 16-year-old boy. One of those women was Amie Hoffman, whose murder Koedatich was later charged with and convicted of. The other three, a woman, a man and a teenage boy who were shot or killed in separate incidents in October and January, remained under investigation, and United Press International reported that suspects were still being sought in two of them. None of those three deaths is part of his criminal record.
Koedatich was first tried for the murder of Amie Hoffman. In October 1984 a Morris County jury convicted him of murder and of related offenses: felony murder, kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and weapons possession.
The trial then moved to a penalty phase under the Capital Punishment Act. Prosecutors offered four aggravating factors. The first was his prior murder conviction, the 1971 second-degree murder conviction in Florida. The second was that the killing took place during a sexual assault and a kidnapping. The third was that the murder was committed to escape detection. The fourth was that it was "outrageously or wantonly vile."
The jurors agreed unanimously on the first two factors. They divided on the other two: eleven of the twelve found the killing vile, and eight found that it had been committed to escape detection. Under New Jersey law an aggravating factor counted only if the jury agreed on it unanimously, so only the prior conviction and the sexual assault and kidnapping factor could be weighed. The jury returned a sentence of death.
Several months after the Hoffman verdict, Koedatich was tried for the murder of Deirdre O'Brien. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, the New Jersey Supreme Court later recorded. That case also went to a penalty phase, and the jurors in it did not agree unanimously that the Florida conviction had been proved as a prior murder conviction.
The two New Jersey murders were tried separately, before separate juries, and they ended in different sentences: death for the killing of Amie Hoffman and life imprisonment for the killing of Deirdre O'Brien.
Koedatich's appeal went to the New Jersey Supreme Court. On August 3, 1988, in State v. Koedatich, the court affirmed the conviction for the murder of Amie Hoffman but vacated the death sentence. As the court later summarized its own ruling, the trial judge had made two errors in instructing the penalty jury. The jurors had been told, wrongly, that mitigating factors had to outweigh the aggravating factors before they could return a sentence other than death. They had also been told, wrongly, that they had to agree unanimously before they could consider a mitigating factor. The case was sent back to Morris County for a new penalty phase.
In September 1988 the Morris County prosecutor's office filed notice that it would again seek the death penalty, relying on the same four aggravating factors it had used in 1984. Koedatich's lawyers objected to two of them. The first jury had not agreed unanimously on the vileness factor or on the escape-detection factor, and the defense argued that the State could not ask a second jury to find them.
The defense relied on two earlier death penalty rulings in the Biegenwald case. In one, the Supreme Court had held that double jeopardy barred the State from using parts of an aggravating factor that the trial evidence did not support; in another, it had suggested that a factor a jury specifically rejected was off limits at a resentencing. The trial court agreed with Koedatich and barred the State from resubmitting any factor the first jury had not found unanimously. The State asked the Supreme Court for leave to appeal, and the court agreed to hear it.
A side issue was the Florida conviction. Because the O'Brien jury had not found it unanimously, the defense argued that the State was barred from using it at the new Hoffman hearing. The trial court rejected that argument, and the defense did not pursue it in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decided the appeal on April 19, 1990, after argument the previous October. Justice Stein wrote for a majority of four: Chief Justice Wilentz and Justices Pollock, Garibaldi and Stein. The court reversed the trial court's order.
The majority looked first at the federal Constitution. Under Bullington v. Missouri, a life sentence returned after a trial-like capital sentencing hearing acts as an acquittal of the death penalty, so the State cannot seek death again. But in Poland v. Arizona the United States Supreme Court had held that a sentencer's failure to find one particular aggravating factor is not an acquittal of that factor, and it had refused to treat capital sentencing as a series of separate trials on each factor. Under that rule, the New Jersey majority concluded, federal law allowed the State to resubmit the two factors.
The majority then held that the state constitution and the New Jersey principle of fundamental fairness led to the same result. A jury's failure to agree unanimously on an aggravating factor, Stein wrote, was not an acquittal. A jury that has unanimously found one factor strong enough to outweigh the mitigating evidence may not deliberate as hard over the others, and the court said it was "unwilling to imbue a jury's non-unanimous decision with respect to an aggravating factor with the same reliability" as an acquittal. The majority also stressed that a capital jury should hear all relevant information about the crime and the defendant, and that defendants were already free to put forward again mitigating factors that an earlier jury had rejected.
Three justices disagreed. Justice Handler argued that aggravating factors are essential elements of the crime of capital murder, because without at least one of them a killing cannot be punished by death. Retrying a factor that a jury had refused to find, he wrote, amounted to retrying the same offense. He also rejected the majority's suggestion that jurors who disagreed on a factor might not have finished deliberating, calling that an unfounded criticism of jurors who had been told they could not consider a factor unless all of them agreed.
Justice O'Hern wrote separately. A non-unanimous verdict in a capital case, he wrote, "is a verdict in every sense of the word," and courts do not allow partial verdicts with reconstituted juries. He distinguished Poland v. Arizona on the ground that Arizona left capital sentencing to a judge, while New Jersey used a jury that had to be unanimous and that was told that failure to agree would produce a sentence other than death. He noted that the State still had other factors available, among them two prior murder convictions, the Florida case and another New Jersey murder, and he argued that those would allow a reliable penalty decision without the rejected factors. Justice Clifford joined O'Hern's dissent and part of Handler's.
The 1990 decision cleared the way for a new penalty hearing in the Hoffman case on all four factors. What that hearing decided has not been reported.
At the Supreme Court in 1990, Koedatich was represented by David A. Ruhnke, designated counsel working with the office of the Public Defender, Alfred A. Slocum. Assistant Prosecutors Joseph Connor Jr. and Thomas J. Critchley Jr. argued for the State, with Lee S. Trumbull as Morris County Prosecutor.
Officials who announced Koedatich's arrest declined to connect him with four other killings in Morris County in the autumn and winter of 1982 to 1983, and none of those deaths has been attributed to him in the court record. The Florida case appears in the New Jersey court record only as a 1971 conviction for second-degree murder, with its year and degree and no further detail of the crime or of his years in a Florida prison.
1971: Convicted of second-degree murder in Florida.
November 23, 1982: Amie Hoffman, 18, is abducted in Cedar Knolls.
November 25, 1982 (Thanksgiving Day): Her body is found in Randolph Township.
December 5, 1982: Deirdre O'Brien, 25, is abducted in Morris Township and stabbed; she dies in a hospital in Hackettstown.
Winter of 1982 to 1983: Koedatich reports to Morristown police that he has been stabbed; he is arrested after leaving the hospital and charged with the O'Brien murder.
October 1984: A Morris County jury convicts him of murdering Amie Hoffman and sentences him to death.
Several months later: He is convicted of murdering Deirdre O'Brien and sentenced to life imprisonment.
August 3, 1988: The New Jersey Supreme Court affirms the Hoffman conviction, vacates the death sentence and orders a new penalty phase.
September 1988: Prosecutors file notice that they will seek death again on all four original aggravating factors; the trial court later bars two of them.
October 23, 1989: The Supreme Court hears argument on the State's appeal.
April 19, 1990: The Supreme Court rules 4 to 3 that the State may resubmit all four factors.