SAN ANTONIO (CN) — Otis McKane, the 36-year-old San Antonio man convicted last month in the 2016 ambush-style shooting of police detective Benjamin Marconi, was sentenced Friday night to death by lethal injection.
“This is a dangerous man,” Bexar County prosecutor Mario Del Prado told jurors during closing statements while pointing at McKane, adding that he is “easily provoked” and has a hatred for law enforcement.
Moments after the jury of six men and six women convicted McKane of capital murder on July 26, he rose from his seat and elbowed a bailiff in the face as handcuffs were being placed on him to be escorted out. Jurors had just been ushered out of the courtroom prior to the incident, but were shown video streams from at least two different angles at various times during the week-long punishment phase by prosecutors.
“You saw what happens when Otis McKane is provoked,” Del Prado said, urging jurors to find McKane a continuing threat to the community. “Twelve law enforcement officers had to go in there and restrain him.”
The jury could have decided to send McKane to prison for life without the possibility of parole, or death. Deliberations lasted for just over seven hours before jurors reached the unanimous death sentence Friday night.
It was a Sunday morning on Nov. 20, 2016 when Marconi, 50, was shot in the head as he wrote a ticket in his squad car outside of the city’s police headquarters. Prosecutors said McKane parked a vehicle behind Marconi’s police cruiser, walked over and fired two shots into the officer’s car, both of which struck him, before fleeing.
A SWAT team arrested McKane without incident about 30 hours after the murder set off a massive multi-agency manhunt.
The ambush-styling shooting was part of a string of attacks on police that year and came four months after the July attacks on police in Baton Rouge and Dallas, where five officers were killed. Marconi was a 20-year veteran of the San Antonio police force who was working an overtime shift when he was shot.
As the sentence was being read late Friday, six sheriff’s deputies stood guard around McKane, who was shackled while hearing the verdict. He appeared stone-faced throughout the day’s proceedings, sporting black, rimless glasses, and at times looking down or with his hand clasped on his face.
At the end of Del Prado’s closing statements, McKane attempted to speak but Bexar County Judge Ron Rangel shut him down, saying he could not speak at that time.
McKane chose not to testify in his own defense at both phases of trial.
Over the last four weeks, jurors saw graphic crime scene and autopsy photos of the slain police detective, viewed dash cam footage of the shooting from his police cruiser and heard from dozens of witnesses.
Prosecutors painted McKane as a “ticking time bomb” with violent tendencies who wanted the police department “to feel the burn” in retaliation for custody-related issues he was having with the mother of his young son.
At one point during closing statements Friday morning, Del Prado appeared to compare McKane to Charles Manson after placing a quote up on the projection screen attributed to the notorious cult leader who committed a series of murders in the summer of 1969.
Defense attorneys made up of Raymond Fuchs, Joel Perez and Daniel De La Garza spent their closing arguments attempting to convince jurors to spare McKane from the death penalty. They centered their arguments on the good things their client has done with his life, his family circumstances growing up in poverty and reiterating that the Supreme Court has reserved capital punishment “for the worst of the worst.”
“The state has not even come close to proving he is a future danger,” Fuchs said, adding that the many mitigating factors in the case should be considered.
While Perez told jurors that what happened to Marconi was “tragic, wrong and evil,” he said that evidence does not establish that he would be a future danger or could not be rehabilitated as an inmate serving the rest of his life in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Perez then implored jurors not to let their decision be swayed by public opinion before leaving them with one last request: “Can we please stop killing young Black men,” he said.
Out of the 198 death row inmates in Texas, 88 are Black, or about 44%, according to figures complied by the Texas Tribune.
McKane’s case will be automatically appealed to the state’s highest court for criminal cases, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, because of the death sentence, a requirement under Texas law.
Judge Rangel, who also serves as the local administrative judge, this week suspended in-person jury trials in Bexar County because of the sharp rise in Covid-19 cases.
Follow @@eidelagarza
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
