KINGSTON, N.Y. — Prosecutors in the Corey Q. Smith murder trial have one more day to produce key witnesses or they will be forced to rest their case.
Ulster County Judge Bryan Rounds on Wednesday granted the District Attorney’s Office a third continuance but said it would be the last delay in the trial, which began on Sept. 16.
Following a two-hour closed-door conference, Rounds sent jurors home for the day, but told them proceedings would continue one way or another on Thursday.
“You will be reporting back to court at 9:30 tomorrow,” Rounds said. “You will either be hearing testimony or closing arguments.”
That Rounds told jurors they could possibly hear closing arguments suggests that Defense Attorney William T. Martin doesn’t intend to call witnesses or mount a defense to the prosecution claim that Smith,36, shot and killed Ashley Stephan Dixon on Feb. 11, 2020.
Prosecutors say Smith shot Dixon three times with a .40-caliber handgun outside the Stuyvesant Charter complex on Sheehan Court at about 7:20 p.m. Dixon was pronounced dead a short time later at HealthAlliance Hospital’s Broadway campus.
Smith was taken into custody the next day in New York City and charged with a federal parole violation. He was charged the following month with second-degree murder for killing Dixon.
Smith has pleaded not guilty to the charge and his attorney has argued that the prosecution has no real evidence to prove otherwise, telling jurors in his opening statement that the prosecution needs to “put up or shut up.”
In his opening statement, Senior Assistant District Attorney Gerard Van Loan told jurors that among those testifying at trial would be Dixon’s girlfriend, Janai Lawrence, who would testify that she drove Smith to the apartment complex to meet with Dixon and watched as the two men argued and as Smith gunned Dixon down.
He also said jurors would hear from another witness who would testify that the two men argued on the telephone about 30 minutes before the shooting.
Neither of those witnesses have been called to the stand and the prosecution has offered no direct evidence tying Smith to the shooting.
On Friday, Kingston Detective Sgt. Alan Nace told jurors that Smith was identified as the shooter by eyewitnesses to the crime, although no one has taken the stand to identify Smith as the shooter, as well as through an inspection of Dixon’s cell phone records and records showing that Smith’s Dodge Durango was located at the apartment complex at the time of the shooting. Jurors also heard testimony that the registration to Smith’s vehicle listed the apartment complex’s address as his own.
Also on Friday, Robert Klein, a former state trooper who now works for the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office, testified that he received call and text message logs from Dixon’s cellphone that showed at least six calls and a number of texts between Dixon and Smith, who was listed in Dixon’s phone contacts as “Borey” (instead of “Corey”), in the hours before Dixon’s death.
Under cross-examination by Martin, Klein said not all of the telephone calls were answered and at least one of the texts from Dixon to Smith indicated that Dixon, who referred to himself in the text as “Ashmatic” wanted to buy a car.
On Monday, Van Loan played for jurors an audio recording from a nearby surveillance camera that he said captured the sounds of three gunshots and Lawrence screaming, “Corey, no! Corey, no!” Jurors were also shown photos that the prosecution said depicted Lawrence’s Mercedes Benz at the 46 Sheehan Court apartment complex at the time of the shooting.
Monday at about 3:30 p.m. was the last time in the trial that jurors heard witness testimony in the case. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, jurors gathered in the courtroom, but were left waiting, on Tuesday for about an hour and on Wednesday for two hours, before being sent home.
The trial will resume at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. The Freeman will live-tweet the proceedings.
