Judge grants Garvey’s request for lengthy sentence for convicted husband-killer Stacey Castor:
When the prosecution stepped up to the podium March 5 to request that convicted murderer Stacey Castor be sentenced to half-a-hundred years in prison, it was Assistant District Attorney Christine Garvey who spoke.
Garvey’s appearance at this important moment made good sense.
While DA Bill Fitzpatrick conducted some of the trial’s most dramatic courtroom questionings — notably the cross-examination of the defendant, who remained strangely stoic in the face of his verbal onslaught — Garvey handled most of the heavy-lifting, introducing the forensic evidence, endless minutiae such as fingerprints and phone calls, and examined many of the police officers who had been to the Castor’s house on Wetzel Road in Clay.
Garvey’s ability to seamlessly present that mountain of circumstantial evidence against Castor was as important as Fitz’s impassioned cross in securing the convictions. So it was more than appropriate that Garvey be the one to formally ask the judge to punish the defendant.
On Feb. 5 an Onondaga County Court jury of two men and 10 women had pronounced Castor guilty of second-degree murder for dosing her second husband, David, with anti-freeze in 2005; attempted second-degree murder for administering a near-fatal mix of booze and pills to her daughter, Ashley Wallace in 2007; and first-degree offering a false instrument for filing a fraudulently back-dated will a few weeks after David’s death.
At last week’s sentencing, after Ashley Wallace and David Castor Jr. each emotionally described how Castor’s actions had irreversibly impacted their lives, Garvey carefully detailed the crimes, one after another.
“To Stacey Castor,’ Garvey said, “human beings are disposable. Her days of deciding who in her family should live and who should die are over.”
Castor is also suspected of poisoning her first husband, Michael Wallace, a decade ago in Weedsport.
Calling her behavior “reprehensible,” Judge Joe Fahey sentenced the 41-year-old Castor to two consecutive terms of 25-year-to-life plus another 16 months for the fraud, 51 years and 4 months altogether.
Castor’s lawyer, Chuck Keller, is expected to appeal the convictions.
