commentary by Patrick H. Moore
The Beatles once sang “Money Can’t Buy Me Love”, and the statement is probably true if by “love” we are referring to a higher, more exalted experience than mere physical coupling. What is arguably also true is the notion that “money can’t buy you happiness”. A good example of this is the peculiar case of multimillionaire pharmaceutical executive Gigi Jordan.
In 2010, NYPD broke down Ms. Jordan’s door at the luxurious Peninsula Hotel at the corner of of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, not far from Trump Tower and the Museum of Modern Art. The sight that met their jaded eyes upon entering the room was not one to warm the cockles of the heart. James C. McKinly, Jr. writes for the New York Times:
When police officers broke down the door at the Peninsula Hotel in 2010, the evidence of what had happened inside Room 1603 seemed fairly clear.
Gigi Jordan, a multimillionaire pharmaceutical executive, was on the floor, disoriented and babbling. Her 8-year-old son lay on a nearby bed — stiff, cold, still. There were scores of pills and bottles of alcohol scattered about.
“I want a lawyer,” she muttered to the first officers who asked her what she had taken, according to prosecutors. To another officer, she said she wanted to die.
That was four-and-a-half years ago. Now, after going through close to a dozen lawyers and flooding the court with “seven banker’s boxes of litigation”, Ms. Jordan, 54, is finally on trial for murder in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Ms. Jordan has never disputed the fact that she gave a fatal dose of drugs to her son, who was autistic and mute, but from the start, she has steadfastly claimed that it was a mercy killing.
Whether we consider her rambling suicide note (she apparently did not intend to survive either), her multitudinous court papers, or her jailhouse interview(s), this beleaguered woman has displeased a pleasing consistency. Her claim is that her first husband, Raymond A. Mirra Jr., a Philadelphia businessman, was planning on killing her or having her institutionalized, and that if that came to pass, her severely handicapped son would fall into the dark clutches of her second husband, the boy’s biological father, Emil Tzekov. According to Ms. Jordan, Tzekov, a Bulgarian yoga instructor, sadistically and sexually abused the child for years, resulting in a catatonic psychosis that his doctors mistook for autism.
So, viewed in a certain light, Ms. Jordan’s arguments, IF TRUE, could conceivably be construed as making an almost viable moral or ethical case that her son would be better off dead than had he fallen in Tzekov’s hands. Of course, that in no way changes the fact that she had no legal right to take matters into her own hands in the manner she did.
“I was trapped in a corner,” she told The Daily News in August 2012. “I was a mother trying to protect my young, my beautiful, my abused son from further sexual torture.”
From a legal standpoint, killing a person to save him from future abuse has never been a recognized defense to murder in New York State, a point the judge, Justice Charles H. Solomon, has made crystal clear during the pendency of this matter.
Her current lawyers plan to argue that Ms. Jordan “killed her son, Jude Mirra, while in the grip of an extreme emotional disturbance”. The great advantage of this defense is that should the jury be convinced, under New York state law, she can be convicted of manslaughter rather than first degree murder.
An additional advantage of this defense is that it apparently allows the defendant’s lawyers to present any and all evidence supporting her complex tale, a story that involves such juicy factors as: 1) the Philadelphia mob; 2) large-scale financial fraud; 3) death threats from her ex-husband; and 4) a satanic cult that tortures children.
Justice Solomon, who seems to be enjoying himself, told prospective jurors last week:
“I can guarantee you, it’s going to be a most interesting case.”
In what may be a record, Ms. Jordan has applied for bail 10 times and has been turned down every time. In June of 2011, while represented by previous counsel, she presented a 93-page bail motion introducing a novel “altruistic filicide” defense.
In this bail application, her lawyers outlined in detail the altruistic filicide argument by combining the theory that she acted in self-defense with the notion that she was coerced by a threat to kill her. As many veteran true crime fans recognize, this concept has been used, at times effectively, in other states to bolster insanity defenses, as in the case of Andrea Yates who claimed that she had drowned her children to save them from the devil.
According to experts on cases in which mothers have been accused of killing their children, the altruistic filicide defense has never been tried alone without combining it with an insanity defense.
It is my sense that this strategy was abandoned for two reasons: first, Mr. Jordon never agreed to be examined by a psychiatric expert for the prosecution; and second; if she did opt for the insanity defense, combined with a theory of altruistic suicide, and lost, she would almost certainly be convicted of first-degree-murder, a maddeningly final outcome.
Whereas with the present strategy advocated by Ms. Jordan’s current legal team — Allan L. Brenner, Norman Siegel and Earl S. Ward – the lawyers can present the defense of extreme emotional disturbance, and base it on the fact that her extreme emotional disturbance was caused by her first husband’s death threats and her belief that her second husband sexually abused her son.
“The jurors will hear horrific extraordinary circumstances that Jude Mirra and Ms. Jordan were subject to,” Mr. Siegel said.
Needless to say, both of Ms. Jordon’s ex husbands have heatedly denied the accusations, claiming they are the distortions of a disordered mind. Mr. Mirra, who divorced Ms. Jordan more than 10 years ago, has filed a slander lawsuit against her in federal court.
In his complaint, Mirra claims Ms. Jordan crisscrossed the country for years seeing medical specialists in a futile quest to find a cure for Jude’s autism. Then in 2008, he said, she began accusing people of abusing the boy, even though “she was by Jude’s side at all hours of the day.”
Mr. Brenner, the lead defense counsel, said Ms. Jordan’s perception of the threat from her two former husbands would be a key issue for the jury. “The defense has always, always, always focused around Gigi’s state of mind,” he said.
The prosecutors, of course, in their typically prosecutorial single-mindedness, really don’t care about pinning down Ms. Jordan’s motive for killing her son. They believe that all they need to do is prove that she did so intentionally. Neither Mr. Mirra nor Mr. Tzekov was present when Jude died and no physical evidence linked them to the child’s death.
“Even if all the allegations she makes could be proved, it’s still murder,” Mr. Bogdanos, one of the prosecutors, wrote in an April motion.
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Pshaw! Why do we have to work? I would give one of my Veiovis horns to attend this trial in person. I’d love to see hear the whole sordid tale, see Ms. Jordon’s defense team in action and watch the stalwart prosecution try to counter them. These guys are pros and you can probably safely assume that they will deliver.
Manslaughter in the First Degree in New York carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in state prison and a minimum sentence of 5.