Confession under scrutiny in attempted homicide trial
Uppermost on the mind of a 70-year-old Portersville man, after being arrested last year and sitting in a police cruiser, was that he didn’t finish off the man he is accused of attempting to kill over the sale of a car.
Paul Harper’s apparent confession to shooting Christopher Galbreath on July 3, 2017, was recorded in a trooper’s vehicle hours after the event.
Harper, now 71, told police that he was enraged to learn that Galbreath was selling a Ford car for $30,000 after Harper had sold him the car for $5,500. The video was shown Tuesday in the courtroom of county Judge William Shaffer in front of his defense lawyers, Laurel Gift and Danielle Bruno, and Assistant District Attorney Robert Zanella. In the court appearance, Harper’s defense introduced several witnesses they intended to call in any future trial.
At one point in the video, Harper can be heard saying, “I’m going to plead guilty” and “Here’s the thing, if you let me go I’ll get him.”
Gift and Bruno questioned state police Trooper Dave Naberezny, who was among troopers responding that night, about reading the Miranda rights to Harper. Naberezny testified that Harper didn’t acknowledge that his rights were read to him and the question remains whether or not Harper’s video confession is the result of being ignorant of his rights.
Did Harper know what he was doing when he confessed in the police vehicle? Or was he in a state of drunkenness and delusion, unaware of what he was doing? And when he was first arrested that night, was he able to process what his Miranda rights were as read to him by police? These are among the questions that both sides will debate in future court appearances.
This is an excerpt — read the whole report from the courtroom in Thursday’s Butler Eagle.
