A man charged and sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of a Myrtle Beach police officer has filed for post-conviction relief and a new trial.
According to court documents, Luzenski Allen Cottrell filed for post conviction relief and a new, non-jury trial on Monday.
The court documents claim Cotrell’s right to “effective assistance of counsel” was violated “when his trial attorneys failed to exercise peremptory strikes to remove two jurors who views, expressed during their voir dire, prevented or substantially impaired their ability to consider constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence.”
The documents also claim the two jurors were unqualified and “because of their self-professed unwillingness to consider a broad range of constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence, it is at least reasonably probable that one or both jurors adversely affected the outcome of the penalty phase deliberations, and that, absent their participation, the result of those deliberations would have been different.”
Cottrell is charged with the murder of police officer Joe McGarry and was sentenced to death on September 27, 2014. The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed Cottrell’s conviction and sentence in 2017. Contrell is being held at the Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia.
Police say McGarry, along with other officers, were investigating a suspicious person just after midnight the morning of December 29, 2002. The officers asked a group of four to step outside the restaurant on North Kings Highway when one of the men pulled a .45 caliber handgun and shot Officer McGarry in the head. Officer McGarry’s partner returned fire, shooting the person in the leg.
The full court documents can be read by clicking here.
