By JOSEPH KELLARD
After Leonard¹s declaration, acting Supreme Court Justice Alan L. Honoroff asked her if she had lied while under oath. Leonard replied that she had, and the judge said that a charge of perjury may be in order.
Honoroff delayed Leonard¹s sentencing until Feb. 8. She faced a maximum 10-year prison sentence for criminally negligent homicide for giving her ailing husband a lethal dose of methadone, but she was expected to receive 18 months as part of her plea bargain. In September, Leonard pleaded guilty to the charges, having surrendered to police at the 1st Precinct in Baldwin in April at the request of her original lawyer, Louis Aresta.
³You¹re making a terrible mistake here,² Leonard¹s current attorney, Eric Naiburg of Central Islip, told his client when she said she was innocent. Asked what her specific ³mistake² was, Naiburg told the Herald, ³That she is delaying her delivery to the state facility and her ultimate release. Every day she spends in Nassau County jail awaiting sentencing is a day more she¹s spending in jail.²
Leonard also said that ³they² were lying, and that she had been framed for the crime. Both Naiburg and Assistant District Attorney Mike Walsh said they were unsure who and what Leonard was referring to when she made those claims.
Honoroff had allowed Leonard to invoke the Serrano Plea, in which a defendant can plead guilty but be exempt from describing his or her crime. The judge has ordered the minutes of Leonard¹s plea. ³We¹re going to take a look at what she said at the time of her plea,² Walsh said. ³She took a Serrano Plea, where she didn¹t really allocate to the criminally negligent homicide, so I don¹t know if there is going to be anything in the record that¹s going to support a perjury charge. I anticipate we¹ll go back to court on Feb. 8, and I don¹t think the judge will entertain an application for her to withdraw her plea. The fact that she¹s now changed her mind doesn¹t give her a basis to withdraw her plea, and I expect that she is going to be sentenced.²
³Walsh is 100 percent right,² Naiburg said.
Prosecutors charged that on the morning of Sept. 13, 2003, in their Knight Street home in Oceanside, Leonard gave her husband, Michael, methadone pills while he was recovering from rotator cuff surgery, and as a result he died hours later. Detectives built a case against Leonard by consulting with medical experts and both her and her husband¹s families.
Leonard, then a licensed practical nurse with a background in pharmacology, told police she wanted to ease her husband¹s pain, and gave him two pills from a bottle prescribed to her for chronic back pain at about 2 a.m. that day, and that at 3 a.m. she gave him three more of the pills, each of which contained about 10 milligrams of methadone, a substance typically used to treat drug addiction and relieve pain. An autopsy found more than 150 milligrams of methadone in Michael Leonard¹s body, much more than the 50 milligrams his wife said she gave him. Walsh said that such a dosage for a first-time user of methadone can be fatal.
³One hundred and fifty is what people on heroin maintenance use,² Walsh said. ³Š As far as we are aware, Mr. Leonard had never taken methadone.²
Walsh said that Michael¹s surgeon prescribed ³some type of pain medication² other than methadone. Prosecutors also charge that Deborah Leonard ‹ who never admitted to a methadone addiction, but never denied it, Naiburg said ‹ took her husband¹s pain management into her own hands, and obtained methadone by writing a false prescription. ³She was in possession of a large quantity of methadone at the time of her arrest,² Walsh said.
Walsh noted that the homicide charges against Leonard were criminal negligence because detectives ³didn¹t have enough evidence to prove anything along the lines that she [had motives for deliberately killing her husband.] ... We couldn¹t establish evidence that this was an intentional murder.²
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 287.
