Jurors, judge hand out two life verdicts

Alphonso Proa-Rios will have to serve at least 38.3 years in prison for the shooting of Clinton Police Detective Mike Murley before he can be considered for parole, District Attorney Angela Marsee said Friday.
Mrs. Marsee spoke after a Custer County jury took only about an hour to find Proa-Rios guilty of two felonies and two misdemeanors in the shooting.
In a surprise move, the defendant testified as the last witness in his own behalf against the advice of his court-appointed attorney, Larry Monard. He claimed the shootings of Murley were a case of mistaken identity, that he thought the officer who was driving an unmarked police car was a drug dealer whom he had cheated in a buy at Watonga and was out to get him. Jurors either didn’t believe him or didn’t care, or both, as they recommended life-in-prison sentences for each of the felonies and one year in the County Jail for each of the misdemeanors with all four terms to run concurrently with one another, and that’s what District Judge Doug Haught assessed.
Count 1 of the charges – assault and battery with a deadly weapon after conviction of two or more felonies – is an 85-percent crime, which means the defendant will have to serve 85 percent of the term before he can even be considered for parole. The Department of Corrections considers a life sentence to be 45 years, said Marsee, so that means he’ll have to serve 38.3 years at a minimum.
And it could be much longer than that, as he’s already serving a 20-year sentence assessed last February on a methamphetamine charge. In fact, it was his failure to appear as scheduled in that case that Murley was trying to arrest him for when he was shot. Judge Haught ordered the sentences in the shooting case to run consecutive to the 20-year meth sentence, but since he could still get time off for good behavior in the latter, he probably won’t have to serve the full 20 years before the 38.3 start running.
At any rate, he should be well over 80 years old if he ever does get out of prison alive.
Murley, who was shot in both arms and still has no feeling on the underside of one of them, said Friday he has a lot of people to thank for the way things turned out both on the day of the shooting and in the trial.
“I’m very grateful to the people who responded that day,” he said, “and also to the District Attorney’s Office for the hard work they put in, especially Ms. Marsee. I’m very grateful to all of them.”
In her closing argument, Marsee asked the jurors to find Proa-Rios guilty on all four charges and assure that he never gets out of prison. “He’s earned it,” she said. 
Clinton firemen were first responders and bandaged Murley’s wounds when he was shot, helping prevent even greater bleeding which could have been life-threatening. Officer Chris Cloninger, who’s no longer on the force, was the first policeman on the scene and chased Proa-Rios down and captured him as ran between houses south of the shooting site.
Besides assault and battery with a deadly weapon, the jury found Proa-Rios guilty of possessing a firearm after former conviction of a felony, for which he received the other life sentence. The misdemeanors were possession of a controlled dangerous substance (methamphetamine found in his pocket that day) and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia (a glass meth smoking pipe).
While on the witness stand, Proa-Rios admitted to six prior felonies, including one in federal court that Marsee said “we didn’t even know about.” She said the law allowed her to use only four priors to enhance his sentence.
Marsee began her closing argument by reminding the jurors of what she’d said in her opening statement of the three-day trial.
“I talked about the people who put their lives in danger every day,” she said. “They’re law enforcement officers, and that’s who Mike Murley is.” She said he gets up every day not knowing if that’s the day somebody is going to try to kill him.
“We know that day was Dec. 7, 2017,” she said, “and we know the person who did that was the defendant here today.
“. . . His actions indicate this was not in self-defense. His actions indicate he was the aggressor. . . . He was committing a felony simply by walking around with a weapon.”
Marsee pooh-poohed Proa-Rios’ claims that he did not know it was Murley in the unmarked Chevrolet Tahoe who was approaching him as he walked near the intersection of Hayes Avenue and S. Third Street.
“He knew the police were looking for him,” she said, because his girlfriend had already told him they’d been at an apartment complex where they thought they might find him.
“As he’s walking down the street, he looks back and sees Murley and starts running,” continued Marsee. “Why is he running? Because he sees Murley.”
She also said it was obvious the defendant was trying to kill the officer.
“You do not take a gun and point it at the head of a person in the driver’s seat and pull the trigger unless you’re trying to kill him,” she said.
Responding to a claim by the defense attorney, Marsee said the only reason Proa-Rios stopped firing his .45-caliber handgun when it still had bullets in it was because he thought he had already killed Murley.
“This was a man who was willing to do anything to avoid arrest,” she said. “The (appearance of the bullet-riddled) Tahoe corroborates Captain Murley’s testimony.”
Speaking of the defendant’s story when he took the stand in his own defense, Marsee said, “He can’t admit he’d tried to kill a police officer so he made up a story about thinking it was some drug dealer trying to come get him. The defendant’s version is not even close to the credibility of Detective Murley.”
Comparing Proa-Rios’ story on the witness stand to what he’d said 11 months earlier the day after the shootings, Marsee said he had told Investigator Trevor Ridgeway then a story “about how he’s on drugs and can’t remember anything.”
Monard, the defense attorney whose advice not to take the witness stand had been ignored, spoke briefly in his closing argument. He said the jury had heard first about how the windshield was blown out of Murley’s vehicle. In reality, he said, “it had a couple of holes in it.” (But the body of the vehicle adjacent to the windshield also had holes in it.)
He also said when Murley’s gun was empty and his injuries wouldn’t let his hands reload, the defendant’s gun still had shells in it.
“If he had intended to kill Detective Murley, he could have gone around that vehicle and done it,” said Monard. “Your burden,” he told the jury, “is to find beyond a reasonable doubt he intended to inflict this bodily injury.” And he claimed they couldn’t do it.
But they did find him guilty of enough to assess two life sentences.