Davis trial prosecution rests, defense begins

COEUR d’ALENE —The defense asked the court for a second time Tuesday to end the murder trial of Joseph J. Davis, this time because prosecutors supposedly failed to show the defendant was guilty of causing the injuries that led to the death of 17-month old Maliki Wilburn.

“The state has no evidence that Mr. Davis acted to cause Maliki’s injury,” Public Defender Jeanne M. Howe said Tuesday in Coeur d’Alene’s First District Court. “There has been no testimony in support of any intentional actions that Mr. Davis caused the accident.”

The defense counsel’s request was made after the prosecution rested, following six days of testimony.

A day earlier, Howe had filed a motion for a mistrial.

Davis, 31, who was arrested Aug. 26, the evening Maliki was injured, has pleaded not guilty to first- degree murder in the boy’s death. The child was considered brain dead at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center that evening and died two days later. Davis told police he thinks the boy fell from a coffee table and fractured his skull, resulting in his death.

District Judge Scott M. Wayman denied Howe’s earlier motion for a mistrial, and he denied Tuesday’s motion as well, saying he would leave it up to the jury to determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence.

Howe then accused prosecutors of misleading the jury with Health and Welfare statistics showing that over a 16-year period, falls had caused no accidental deaths of children in Idaho.

“That’s simply not true,” Howe said. “It’s inaccurate to present that to the jury.”

The defense has intimated that a fall 18 inches from a coffee table resulted in Maliki’s death.

Howe said the statistic provided by the prosecution was misleading, likely convinced the jury of Davis’ guilt, and was therefore unfair to her client, Howe said.

Wayman, however, cited state court rules to rebut Howe’s request.

Earlier in the day Howe objected to allowing photographs be submitted into evidence that showed Davis alone entering the Coeur d’Alene apartment at 815 N. Fifth St. where Maliki, his stepson, was injured, after the boy was taken away in an ambulance.

Wayman denied that motion.

The photographs were submitted after a noon recess when Coeur d’Alene Police Officer Ashley Caiafa testified that she and another officer, Amy Niska, saw Davis enter his apartment by himself before a search warrant of the apartment was granted.

Caiafa said Davis retrieved a set of keys so he and his then wife, Dacia Cheyney, Maliki’s mom, could follow the ambulance to the hospital.

Davis had been in the apartment “a minute, maybe less,” Caiafa said.

In earlier testimony, Cheyney said she did not recall misplaced items in the apartment when she tended to her son as he lay on the floor before medics arrived.

Caiafa’s testimony and the photographs submitted by prosecutors attempted to give credence to a notion that Davis may have tampered with evidence while he was alone in the apartment.

The first witness for the defense, Dr. Carl Wigrin, a Seattle-based forensic pathologist whose practice specializes in private autopsies said he would not rule out the possibility that Maliki’s injuries were a result of a fall from a coffee table.

“Medical literature has many reports of that,” Wigrin said. “I can’t rule that out at all.”

The trial resumes today at 9 a.m. on the second floor of the old federal building in downtown Coeur d’Alene.