Death penalty for Baldwin cop’s killer

Ronell Wilson, 31, who murdered two NYPD officers, Detective James Nemorin of Baldwin and another officer, Rodney Andrews, during an undercover gun buy in 2003, was sentenced to death last week — the second time he has been given the death penalty in the case.

Wilson was originally condemned to death after a 2006 conviction — the first death penalty sentence in New York state in half a century — but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned that sentence in 2010, citing technical violations and sending the case back to U.S. District Court for resentencing.

Wilson’s guilt was not at issue during the retrial, only the sentence, and it took a Brooklyn federal jury of seven men and five women about five hours to decide that he should die by lethal injection. Wilson’s defense centered on the circumstances of his upbringing in a roach-infested, single-parent household, and his defense team also argued that he was learning-disabled and had never mastered the differences between right and wrong. His attorneys asked for a sentence of life without parole.

During a March 2003 Staten Island sting operation, Wilson killed Nemorin, 36, and Andrews, 34, in order to steal $1,200 in police funds that was to be used to “buy” a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun. Prosecutors asserted that Wilson killed Andrews, a father of two, by shooting him in the unmarked police car that was used during the buy, and then executed Nemorin, whose family now lives in Bellmore, while the father of three begged for his life. Wilson, who was described at trial as an “unrepentant predator,” then dumped the officers’ bodies on St. Paul Avenue and drove off. The police officers who arrested him two days later found handwritten rap lyrics bragging about the murders.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said he believed the verdict was just. “When two New York City police officers were killed in cold blood, it was more than a calculated attack on two outstanding human beings,” he said. “It was an assault on the society that those officers represented, and for that reason their murders had to be answered with the full force of punishment at society’s disposal.”

Observers of the legal process expect several more years of appeals before Wilson’s sentence is carried out.