A Perthshire woman serving a five-year sentence in the US has had her hopes of a retrial dashed.
Joanna Findlay (41) was sentenced to imprisonment by a judge in Maryland in February.
She was convicted of attempting to kill her husband, former US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Gary Trogdon, at their home in the American state after discovering child sex abuse images on his computer.
Findlay has always maintained her innocence and told her trial that her husband had turned his gun on himself after she confronted him.
A jury cleared her of an original charge of murder after concluding that he did kill himself, but convicted her on a charge of second-degree attempted murder and a handgun charge.
The latter offence carried a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. She was given a suspended sentence for the attempted murder. The Scot has since been held at Jessup Women’s Prison, where she hoped that an appeal against her conviction would find favour.
Her parents, Thomas and Frieda Findlay from Blairgowrie, have regularly travelled to America to support their daughter and they have always believed her innocent of any wrongdoing.No retrialThe family had pinned their hopes on an appeal and retrial but, in what will be new heartache for the family, a St Mary’s Circuit judge has now denied that request.
It means Findlay could face seeing out her sentence in the US, unable to be reunited with her loved ones on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lawyers representing Findlay had argued that their client might have been acquitted of the charges facing her had the trial’s prosecutor not ”unfairly” told jurors that her sworn testimony could not be believed as she was an atheist.
Judge Karen Abrams decided that jurors had not been swayed by the remark, to which she had sustained an objection during the trial.
In a written opinion she noted: ”The verdict indicates that the jury did find the defendant’s testimony credible, for it evidently believed her testimony that she did not kill her husband.
”As a result, it cannot be concluded that the defendant was prejudiced by the state’s attorney’s comments, or that they resulted in an improper verdict.”Alleged imagesJoanna Findlay moved from Blairgowrie to the US 15 years ago on a student exchange programme and married Gary Trogdon four years later.
Findlay, a former Dundee College and Aberdeen University student, worked at Maryland University as a lecturer.
During her trial the St Mary’s Court heard that the couple had started fighting after Findlay confronted Trogdon about more than 3,000 allegedly indecent images of children she found on his computer.
Sheriff’s deputies were called to the couple’s Hollywood home on October 30, 2010, following an incident.
The case soon centred on two guns found in the home and pornography discovered during the subsequent investigation.
Testimony from the medical examiner said an autopsy had determined that Trogdon had been killed by a .38-calibre handgun while Findlay had fired a .22 pistol on the evening.
Findlay’s trial attorney had argued that her outrage on discovering the child pornography had ledTrogdon to commit suicide.