Jason Young waits to learn whether he’ll get 3rd murder trial

Jason Young left the Wake County courthouse on Thursday and returned to prison, once again in limbo about his fate.

The 43-year-old former medical software salesman spent the day in court beside a new legal team arguing that the defense lawyers who represented him at his two murder trials were ineffective in the second one. Young was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012, six years after his pregnant wife Michelle Fisher Young was found bludgeoned to death in their Wake home.

Judge Paul Ridgeway presided over the hearing and told all involved that “it may be some period of time before I get back to you.”

Ridgeway plans to wait until he has a full transcript from the hearing and then mull over legal questions about whether the two lawyers who represented Young at the trial that led to his conviction had made such egregious mistakes that a third trial should be granted.

The hearing put Bryan Collins, a former public defender, in an unusual seat in the courtroom. Since the Young trial, Collins has become a Wake Superior Court judge, and on only one other occasion, he said, had he been called to the witness stand as he was on Thursday.

Collins was questioned by Robert Trenkle, a new member of Young’s defense team, about strategies he used during the second trial to try to keep the jury from hearing evidence about civil proceedings surrounding Michelle Young’s death. Wake Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens ruled in one of those cases that Young was responsible for his wife’s death.

“I remember trying to keep it out because it was unfair, and it was obvious to me that it was coming in,” Collins said. “The biggest concern that I had was that Judge Stephens had entered an order declaring Jason Young to be the slayer.”

Mike Klinkosum, a Raleigh lawyer who has been recognized by his peers as a skilled defense attorney, was also involved in deciding how to handle the civil proceedings at the criminal trial. But he has had health problems that interfered with his ability to participate in the hearing this week.

Collins said neither he nor Klinkosum researched other cases that might have helped them limit the damage for Young if evidence from the civil cases were introduced.

Trenkle, with the aid of Paul Green, an assistant appellate defender, argued that though both Collins and Klinkosum were well-respected attorneys, “they messed up here.”

“There’s no excuse for not conducting legal research,” Trenkle said.

Two stories

Assistant Wake District Attorney Howard Cummings argued Thursday that even if Young’s defense team had made mistakes that Ridgeway should consider the totality of their performance and all the evidence. Cummings urged Ridgeway not to look at their performance “through a microscope.”

The death of Young’s wife, and his insistence that he was out of town on a business trip when it happened, created two competing narratives about a 169-mile path between Raleigh and the hotel in southwestern Virginia that he checked into the night she died.

Prosecutors contend that Young, a philanderer looking to get out of his marriage, left the couple’s home on Nov. 2, 2006, and drove to Hillsville, Va., and checked into a Hampton Inn there at 10:54 p.m. They argued that he left the hotel shortly after his arrival, took time to disable security cameras in a side entrance stairwell, returned to his home, killed his wife and left their daughter, a toddler at the time, alone with her lifeless mother.

The defense team argued at both trials that prosecutors presented convoluted fiction in their drive to convict after homing in early on Young as their chief suspect. They argued that Young would not have had time to kill his wife so violently, clean up and then, without tracking any blood or other evidence from the crime scene into his Ford Explorer, make it to Wytheville, Va., by 7:40 a.m., when his first cellphone activity of the day was recorded.

The first jury to hear the case was deadlocked 8 to 4 in favor of acquittal.

The second jury, according to a member’s account shortly after the verdict, focused on the timeline and what evidence jurors had heard that bolstered the prosecutors’ theories and what they had from the defense.

Prosecutors contended Young carried out a ferocious killing in the early hours of Nov. 3, 2006, covering 340 miles in a round trip from southwestern Virginia to suburban Wake County and back between midnight and dawn.

No electronic trail

In a digital age, when it’s easy to piece together a person’s activities and whereabouts from phone calls, texts, receipts and security cameras, there was no electronic trace of Young – from shortly before midnight, when Hampton Inn security cameras in Hillsville showed him in the lobby, to 7:40 a.m. Nov. 3, 2006, when he called his mom’s house in Brevard from near a cellphone tower near Wytheville.

The juror said it was questions the defense team could not answer that pushed the jury toward its guilty verdict. Clothes and shoes that Jason Young was seen wearing in security camera footage were never found. And though Cassidy Young, only 2 1/2 when her mother died, had tracked bloody footprints around the master bedroom where the crime occurred, the toddler’s feet and pink pajamas were clean when Meredith Fisher, Michelle Young’s sister, discovered the body.

Stephens, the chief resident judge who presided over the criminal proceedings earlier this decade, also presided over civil lawsuits brought against Young before he was charged with murder. Those civil proceedings – a wrongful death suit and a custody battle brought by Young’s in-laws – were the underpinnings of the N.C. Appeals Court ruling vacating the 2012 jury’s guilty verdict.

Young never responded to the civil proceedings. He would have had to sit for depositions by attorneys for his former mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who suspected he was involved in his wife’s death.

In 2008, Stephens ruled in the civil proceeding that Young was responsible for his wife’s death after he failed to respond to the claim – a default judgment that does not declare innocence or guilt.

At the 2012 trial, prosecutors presented evidence about those proceedings.

Barbara S. Blackman, a North Carolina assistant appellate defender, argued at the state Court of Appeals that telling jurors about those proceedings made Young’s criminal trial an unfair one.

“If this type of evidence is admitted, for what will apparently be the first time in the country in a homicide prosecution, I think it’s simply going to open the door to the pursuit of civil litigation before indictment in order to manufacture evidence for a criminal trial,” Blackman argued.

Young had declined to speak to investigators and only explained his actions at the time of Michelle Young’s 2006 death when he testified at his first trial in 2011 – 1,693 days after her body was found in their home.

He testified that he did not respond to the wrongful death and custody civil proceedings because he could not afford a lawyer at the time.

This story was originally published June 15, 2017 at 6:19 PM with the headline "Jason Young waits to learn whether he’ll get 3rd murder trial."