“I always had the same strategy throughout the trial,” defense lawyer Ken Padowitz told the Sun Sentinel on Friday. “The jury heard me say to them in opening that my client believed this was the way Ms. Marquinez died. What I didn’t tell them until closing is that he was most likely wrong.”
Size didn’t matter in the end.
Lawyers for the Florida man acquitted in his girlfriend’s murder Monday initially presented the improbable argument that she choked to death performing oral sex, but have since acknowledged they always knew that their client’s supposedly big penis did not kill her.
The admission comes after Richard Patterson, 65, of Margate, was found not guilty earlier this week of killing his 60-year-old girlfriend Francisca Marquinez in 2015.
“I always had the same strategy throughout the trial,” defense lawyer Ken Padowitz told the Sun Sentinel on Friday. “The jury heard me say to them in opening that my client believed this was the way Ms. Marquinez died. What I didn’t tell them until closing is that he was most likely wrong.”
The case first made national headlines when Padowitz filed a motion to take the unorthodox approach of having his client show his penis to the jury.
According to Padowitz, it was a calculated move to kick off the trial with a sensational defense before reversing course.
“As distasteful and humiliating as the defense strategy was here, it was absolutely necessary since my client believed that was how this woman died,” Padowitz told the Sun Sentinel.
The strategy allowed him to introduce an argument that would appear more conceivable to jurors in comparison.
Emphasizing how Marquinez’s cause of death was never determined, he suggested the possibility that she died of a heart attack or stroke.
In the trial’s closing arguments, Padowitz referenced the big-penis defense: “That’s not the way she died, but that’s the way Richard Patterson thought she died.”
In the end, it took less than five hours for the jury to reach a not-guilty verdict.
