One of the killers of 3-year-old P.J. Bourgeois was already out on the street, released early from prison by Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Nodine Miller. Now the other killer wanted Judge Miller to let him out, too.
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With Tracy Lynn Bratton, who helped to kill P.J., back in Lewistown, Pa. (one of the reasons Judge Miller let Bratton out of prison was so she could care for two other children in Lewistown), Bratton’s boyfriend — Patrick Bourgeois, P.J.’s father — filed a motion with Judge Miller asking her to grant him “supershock probation” as she had to Bratton.
Franklin County prosecutors never responded to Bourgeois’ motion. They didn’t oppose it, they didn’t offer their opinion on it, they didn’t do a thing.
“We would have opposed it if we had known the motion had been filed,” Franklin County Prosecuting Atty. Ron O’Brien told us.
What? Was O’Brien saying that his office was unaware that a killer had filed a motion with the court asking to be set free early?
“Our files never reflected that the motion was received,” O’Brien told us.
Was O’Brien implying that Bourgeois’ defense attorney had somehow not served the prosecutors with the motion to free Bourgeois?
“I don’t want to say that,” O’Brien said.
Bourgeois’ attorney, Kirk McVay, is indignant at any hint of a suggestion that he had not provided the prosecutors with the motion.
“I filed it last March,” McVay said. “I took it right to the prosecutor’s office. What they did with it, I don’t know.”
The assistant prosecutor in charge of the case against P.J.’s killers — Ed Morgan, chief of the office’s criminal division — told us: “I never saw the motion.” He said he believes be might have been on vacation when it was served.
So it appears that Patrick Bourgeois’ motion to be let out of prison for killing his son was lost by the prosecutors who had the power to oppose it.
And they didn’t oppose it — they didn’t respond to it. The motion went in front of Judge Miller with no argument against it from the prosecutors.
Judge Miller told us that the fault for this belongs in one place and one place only: the prosecutor’s office.
“I have no idea whether they forgot it in their office, or what,” Judge Miller said. “This was pending for a very long time [from March, when McVay filed the motion on behalf of Bourgeois, until late in the summer, when Judge Miller ruled on the motion].”
The judge told us that if prosecutors had in any way told her that their failure to oppose Bourgeois’ request to be released was because they had been unaware of the motion’s existence, “I would have given them more time.”
Even after she had ruled that Bourgeois should be released from prison early, she would have considered a motion from the prosecution asking her to reconsider her decision, the judge said — had the prosecutors let her know in an official way that their failure to respond to Bourgeois’ motion was because they weren’t aware that it had been filed.
“They didn’t do it — they didn’t ask me to reconsider or give them more time,” Judge Miller told us. Any statement by prosecutors to the contrary, Judge Miller said, is “totally inaccurate.”
So with the boy dead and unable to speak for himself, with one of his killers out of prison and living with other children, with the second killer asking to be released, with no objection from the prosecutors, Judge Miller did indeed sign the papers that would release Patrick Bourgeois and put him back on the streets, too.
There was to be another hearing –to set the conditions for Bourgeois’ release — and by that time the prosecutors knew what had happened. But even at that hearing, they did not object to Bourgeois going free. “It was too late at that point,” assistant prosecutor Morgan told us. Judge Miller disagrees: She told us she would have listened to anything Franklin County prosecutors would have presented to her at that point.
“If I were the judge, I would not have done what she did,” Prosecuting Atty. O’Brien told us. But he conceded that, through a series of apparent mistakes, his office did nothing to try to stop her.
So Judge Miller made it official: The other killer of the 3-year-old boy was going to walk free. We will report Wednesday.
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On Wednesday, Oprah Winfrey will devote her entire broadcast to Bob Greene’s coverage of this case. The program will be telecast on WLS-Ch. 7 at 9 a.m., and again at 11:05 p.m.