Putnam County jurors were sent home for the night Thursday after deliberating for about three hours and 15 minutes in the retrial of Richard Kereta, accused of seriously injuring a teenage girl in 2007 while driving drunk.
Circuit Judge Kevin Galley said early in the week he intended to end court days in the trial at about 4:30 p.m. He stuck to that schedule Thursday after deliberations in the Princeton man’s 10-count case began early in the afternoon.
The five men and seven women are scheduled to resume that process at 9 a.m. Friday. They will make their decisions without hearing Kereta’s version of events that resulted in grave injuries to a teenage girl who was hit by a sport utility vehicle at about 5:22 p.m. on Nov. 30, 2007.
In his first trial, Kereta broadly contradicted prosecution claims that he ran over Nicole Engelbrecht while driving drunk in her SUV. However, he chose Thursday not to take the stand at all in his retrial. His first trial, last October, ended in a mistrial.
“My decision, through talking to (my attorney), is to not testify,” Kereta told Galley.
As a result, the only defense evidence heard by jurors was the brief testimony of two witnesses who said Kereta had not seemed intoxicated earlier on the afternoon of the incident.
But defense attorney Robert Nolan used his closing argument to attack the adequacy of the prosecution evidence, including the testimony that Engelbrecht, now 19, gave by typing because traumatic brain injury suffered that day has left her unable to speak.
In one line of argument, Nolan urged jurors to discount her testimony on the grounds the extended coma she suffered as a result of injuries that day could make her memories unreliable.
“I would suggest to you that you can’t give weight to her testimony,” Nolan told the jury.
That prompted a sharp response from co-prosecutor Ed Parkinson of the Illinois State’s Attorneys’ Appellate Prosecutor’s Office. He disparaged Nolan’s tactics as “nice dancing” in a sarcastic comparison to ice dancing in the Winter Olympics.
Nolan was “dancing around the facts – trying to confuse you from what you know about the facts,” Parkinson told jurors.
“Nicole told you everything she remembers. And even if she didn’t remember anything,” he added, “don’t you think we’d be here anyway? The evidence tells you everything you need to know.”
While the defense offered no alternative explanation of events, Nolan insisted the prosecution case contained too many “guesses” and enough unanswered questions to create reasonable doubt needed for acquittal.
When a verdict is reached, he said, “I’m confident that it will be a verdict of not guilty.”
The most serious charges facing Kereta, 45, are three counts of aggravated DUI. If convicted on at last one, he could face up to 12 years in prison under special sentencing standards for that offense.
Gary L. Smith can be reached at 686-3114 or [email protected].
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