Newsday.com: First LI man on death row taken off

First LI man on death row taken off

BY ALFONSO A. CASTILLO
STAFF WRITER

October 25, 2005, 8:48 PM EDT

The first person on Long Island to be sentenced to capital punishment since New York adopted it 10 years ago is now officially off death row, after the state's highest court yesterday upheld the conviction of serial killer Robert Shulman, but vacated his death sentence.

Shulman was convicted in 1999 of bludgeoning three women to death inside his Hicksville apartment. The bodies of the victims -- Kelly Sue Bunting, 28; Lisa Ann Warner, 18; and a woman who was never identified -- were found dismembered in Melville, Brooklyn and Medford.

"There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of the condition that guy left my poor daughter's body," said Bunting's father, John Bunting Jr. of suburban Los Angeles. He said he was "happy" the conviction was upheld, and unfazed by the vacating of Shulman's sentence.

"On death row, he's living a peaceful life," he said. "I really hope somebody in prison will kill him."

In May 1999, a Suffolk jury sentenced Shulman to death, but his sentence was invalidated last year when the Court of Appeals nullified the state's capital punishment law because of a provision that gave jurors flawed instructions.

Shulman was the last remaining of Long Island's three death row inmates. Stephen LaValle, who raped and killed a Medford jogger, and Nicholson McCoy, who sodomized and killed a female co-worker in a supermarket bathroom, have both been re-sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"We're pleased the court upheld the prosecutors' case against the defendant," District Attorney Thomas Spota said in a statement. "This sordid chapter of Suffolk history will conclude when Shulman is resentenced."

That is expected to happen in about two months. Prosecutors will recommend life without parole.

In their appeal, the Legal Aid attorneys representing Shulman argued that several errors were made by the court that justified a new trial. Among them, they argued that police did not have probable cause to arrest Shulman; that the trial judge, State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Pitts, abused his discretion in denying defense attorneys' challenges to three jurors; and that the jury was incorrectly instructed that the murders were committed in a "similar fashion," when there were significant differences in each.

The Court of Appeals rejected the arguments, and noted that in all three cases Shulman brought the women home, beat them to death with "a heavy, blunt object" and "used such force that he split the victims' skulls open."

Bunting spoke at Shulman's original sentencing six years ago, calling the killer's lack of remorse "despicable." When Shulman returns to a Riverhead courtroom to receive his new punishment, Bunting said he will speak again, "even if I have to drive there."

"I want to face him and tell him what I think of him, one more time," he said.