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Defense Attempts To Spare Life Of Convicted Killer

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By THOMAS W.  KRAUSE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 1, 2007

TAMPA - A defense attorney for Khalid Ali Pasha described the convicted killer as likable, hard working, religious and generous.

"He had one fatal flaw: He was a womanizer," Robert Fraser told a jury this morning. "Fidelity was not in his makeup."

In today's daylong hearing, Fraser attempted to persuade the jury to send Pasha to prison for the rest of his life with no possibility of parole. Should a majority of the jurors agree with prosecutors, however, Pasha will be sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Friday morning, the jury will hear closing arguments before they begin deliberations.

Fraser said Pasha left his first wife for another woman. In 2002, after serving a prison term for bank robbery, he left his second wife for Robin Canady, the woman he was convicted of murdering. Pasha also was convicted Wednesday of murdering Canady's 20-year-old daughter, Ranesha Singleton.

Fraser said he could offer the jury no motive for the deaths of Canady and Singleton.

Pasha, he said, can be paranoid, deeply suspicious and not trusting.

"How that plays in with these murders, frankly, is not as clear as I'd like it to be, but it might be a hint at a reason," Fraser said.

Pasha sat in the courtroom today in an orange jail jumpsuit. Through the past several days of trial testimony, Pasha wore a dark suit and tie.

"As you can tell from Mr. Pasha's garb today," Fraser told the jurors, "he is no longer fit to live among us."

Life in prison, Fraser said, is the appropriate punishment. No matter what the jury does, Pasha will wear similar inmate clothing until he is dead.

Prosecutors kept the arguments simple and to the point this morning.

Assistant State Attorney Jalal Harb told the jurors that Pasha had committed other crimes, including bank robbery. The aggravating circumstances of the crime, as described during the trial testimony, outweigh any mitigating factors presented by the defense, Harb said.

At trial, witnesses testified that on Aug. 23, 2002, they were in the parking lot behind Woodland Corporate Center near Waters and North Manhattan avenues. They saw a tall black man walk in and out of the woods carrying a shiny object and wearing a white jumpsuit covered with blood.

While on the phone with a 911 operator, one witness and his wife said they saw the man get in a white van, then drive away as they followed in their pickup.

Deputies stopped Pasha as he waited for a red light at the wheel of a white van he used in his job as an environmental technician.

In the van, they found a white jumpsuit covered with the victims' blood and a bloody knife. Through the woods at the corporate center, deputies came to a cul-de-sac and found the car and bloody bodies of Canady and Singleton.

More blood was found on Pasha's boots, on his tank top and on latex gloves found in the van.

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