Ferrante loses appeal in 2013 poisoning death of his wife

A former University of Pittsburgh neuroresearcher convicted of poisoning his wife with cyanide lost his appeal in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court on Thursday.

Robert Ferrante, 73, who is serving a sentence of life in prison without parole at the State Correctional Institution at Houtzdale, was found guilty of first-degree murder for killing his wife, Dr. Autumn Klein, in April 2013.

Klein, 41, collapsed at the couple’s Schenley Farms home on April 17, 2013, after getting home late from a shift at UPMC Presbyterian where she worked as a women’s neurologist.

Klein never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead three days later. Blood tests later confirmed that she died from cyanide poisoning.

Investigators learned that Ferrante, who operated a research lab at Pitt, had ordered cyanide to be delivered to his lab just days before his wife’s collapse.

After Ferrante’s arrest, his defense attorneys, William Difenderfer and Wendy Williams, won a motion to have the jury in the case chosen from outside of Allegheny County because of pretrial publicity, known as a change of venire. However, a month before trial, they withdrew the motion, instead opting for a local jury.

The case went to trial in October 2014, and despite attempts by the defense to convince the jurors that Klein died from something other than cyanide, Ferrante was convicted.

He filed several appeals, including whether the sufficiency and weight of the evidence was enough to sustain a conviction against him. Now-retired Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning, who presided over the trial, dismissed all of Ferrante’s claims except one, which he said required a hearing — whether Ferrante’s defense counsel had a reasonable basis for withdrawing Ferrante’s motion for a change of venire, and if not, whether Ferrante was prejudiced by it.

As part of his appeal, Ferrante wrote: “I believe I was coerced, placed under great duress and provided false promises into waiving my rights to a change of venire.”

After Manning’s retirement, the case was assigned to Judge Bruce Beemer, who held a hearing on the issue on July 6.

During the evidentiary hearing before Beemer, Williams testified that during a Sept. 2, 2014, status conference in Manning’s chambers, the parties discussed the “complexities of choosing a jury in Dauphin County,” and the defense opted to pick in Allegheny County.

Williams testified that she could not remember whether Ferrante was questioned on the record about his decision.

However, Ferrante’s appellate attorney, Chris Eyster, did not call either Difenderfer or the defendant himself, to show whether the decision to waive the change of venire was knowingly made.

Without having done that, the prosecution argued, there was no way to show whether defense counsel was ineffective, as was required by Ferrante’s post-conviction petition.

In his opinion denying the appeal, Beemer said that it was Ferrante’s burden at the hearing to show that Difenderfer had no reasonable basis to waive the change of venire and that he was prejudiced by that decision.

Because he failed to do that, Beemer wrote, he did not meet his burden and is not entitled to relief.

Although Eyster repeatedly asked Beemer to go back and reconsider prior rulings by Manning in the case related to several other appellate issues, Beemer refused, noting that the defense had been specifically instructed that the court would only address the venire issue.

Beemer wrote that he is bound by the “coordinate jurisdiction rule,” which prohibits a court involved in later phases of a case from reopening questions already decided by another judge of the same court.

“These new claims are not only impermissible, but ignore the court’s briefing directive,” Beemer wrote.