Slain cop's son: Execute her killer

Slain Police Officer Lauretha Vaird's older son wishes a judge would hurry up and give his mother's convicted killer, Christopher Roney, the death penalty.

"Hurry up and lay him on the table," is how Michael Caesar, 30, put it.

Roney, 39, dressed in a maroon prison jumpsuit, was in court again yesterday for a post-conviction hearing before Common Pleas Judge Gary Glazer, who is to decide whether to vacate Roney's death-penalty sentence.

The judge, who presided over Roney's 1996 jury trial, yesterday heard arguments on whether Roney had been properly represented at his penalty-phase hearing.

Roney's federal public defenders - a team that includes James Moreno and Helen Marino - argued that there was a "constellation" of mitigating factors that trial defense attorney Nino Tinari never looked into at Roney's penalty-phase hearing.

Such factors, including a family history of abuse and Roney's depression and drug use when his rap-music career floundered, might have swayed one juror to have compassion toward Roney, and could have led to a life sentence rather than death, they contended.

Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Graham-Rubin argued that the new mitigating factors presented by the defense were not credible. She said that Roney had told a pre-sentence investigator that he had not been abused by his family, but had only been disciplined when he had done something wrong. She called stories of his depression "exaggerated."

If the judge vacates Roney's sentence, Roney would receive a new penalty-phase hearing, in which a jury could again sentence him to the death penalty or could give him life in prison.

Roney was convicted of first-degree murder in October 1996 by a jury that found that he shot Vaird in the abdomen on Jan. 2, 1996, as the officer walked into the PNC Bank on Rising Sun Avenue near Wyoming, Feltonville.

Roney and Ernest Mark Canty were in the bank to rob it. After the shooting, Roney fled the bank and exchanged gunfire with Police Officer Donald Patterson before jumping into a getaway minivan, driven by accomplice Warren McGlone.

Vaird, 43, a single mother of two boys, was pronounced dead shortly afterward at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children. She was the city's first female officer killed in the line of duty.

McGlone and Canty, convicted of second-degree murder, are serving life sentences.

In January 2005, the state Supreme Court affirmed Roney's conviction and death sentence.

Caesar, Vaird's son, said after yesterday's arguments that he found the defense team's new set of mitigating circumstances "bull- - - -."

"I had a rough life," he said. "I had depression. I didn't go out and kill a cop. . . . The bottom line is, [Roney] had a choice - to walk out the door or stay and do what he did. He deserves the death penalty. My whole family is hurting behind this." *