Murder convictions against Steven Kellam vacated

A Delaware Superior Court judge has vacated two convictions of first-degree murder against a Dover man due to erroneous jury instructions at his 2017 trial.

While vacating the murder and weapons charges knocks off two life sentences and 150 years of jail time, Steven Kellam is still on the hook for 619 years in prison on his other convictions. State prosecutors have the option to retry Kellam on the murder charges.

Mat Marshall, spokesman for Delaware Department of Justice, said the department is refraining from comment while it considers its options.

The Kellam case began nearly a decade ago, when on June 22, 2015, Kellam was indicted for a series of robberies and home invasions that included the January 2014 murders of Cletis Nelson and William Hopkins at a home on Harmons Hill Road near Millsboro. Prosecutors had fingered Kellam as the leader of a crime ring that had committed robberies and home invasions in Kent and Sussex counties.

At trial, it was established that Kellam did not pull the trigger himself in the murders of Nelson and Hopkins, but prosecutors argued that he was the one who gave the order for the two men to be killed and that he provided the guns used in the murders, allegedly carried out by Rhamir Waples, Damon Bethea and Richard Robinson, cousins of Kellam who had come to Sussex County from the Philadelphia area to commit a robbery. Waples and Robinson each took guilty pleas for their part in the murders, but Bethea was found not guilty at trial.

After a six-week trial, Kellam was found guilty of the two murders, as well as robbery, conspiracy and weapons charges, and home invasion. He was sentenced to two mandatory life sentences for the murders and 769 years in prison. At his sentencing in March 2018, Kellam claimed he was innocent and denied the accusation put forth by prosecutors that he had ordered the killings in part as revenge for a fight between a cousin and Hopkins, which Hopkins won. Kellam said his trial attorney, Patrick Collins, did not show evidence at trial that would have proved his innocence.

Since then, Kellam has been seeking to have the murder convictions overturned. His first appeal was denied by the Delaware Supreme Court. Kellam’s attorney then filed a motion for post-conviction relief, which was delayed by both the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down the courts and a change in judge from Judge Craig Karsnitz to Judge Francis Jones.

In his motion for post-conviction relief, Kellam’s main arguments centered around five instances of ineffective counsel, either by his attorney at trial or by his appellate attorneys. Most of these arguments were denied by Jones in his decision, but the one that stuck was Kellam’s argument that Collins, his trial counsel, was ineffective by failing to object to the felony murder instructions given to the jury. 

Following the presenting of evidence, both prosecuting and defense attorneys meet with the judge to go over what instructions will be read to the jury for their consideration. The instructions define the parameters of the charges and whether the jury can consider lesser offenses in their deliberations, among other things.

During his trial, according to Jones’ 84-page opinion, Judge T. Henley Graves, who presided over the trial and has since retired, gave the wrong definition of first-degree murder, using a version of the statute from before it was revised in 2004. Kellam argued that Collins’ failure to object to the erroneous instructions constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel. As such, Jones said, the outcome of the murder charges could have been different with the proper instructions.

In his opinion, Jones said Delaware Supreme Court precedent established that use of an erroneous felony-murder instruction that did not accurately state the law could merit post-conviction relief. In addition, in an affidavit to the court, Collins stated that he failed to notice the old instruction and object to the outdated language. By doing so, Jones said, it cleared a path for a first-degree murder conviction, as it held Kellam responsible for the crimes of his accomplices. 

Besides the first-degree murder convictions, Jones also vacated felony counts related to the murders and for possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. 

Kellam tried to expand his argument regarding the jury instructions to charges of home invasion, assault and robbery, but Jones rejected these arguments, stating that his conviction on those charges would not have had a different outcome.