Historic 12-week murder trial ends with two 50 year sentences
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Two men were sentenced to 50 years in prison each on Wednesday, the culmination of a historically long murder trial in Queens Criminal Court. Photo by Walter Karling
By Ryan Schwach
The historically long 12-week Queens murder trial that wrapped six-years after the killing is now, finally finished after sentencing on Wednesday.
Judge Ira Margulis sentenced both defendants, Shakim Allen and Dreshaun Smith, both 29-years-old and from Jamaica, to 50 years in prison for the 2017 murder of Rocky Kalisaran and the wounding of his brother Sonny – which was the first homicide of that year.
“One of the two victims was shot trying to rescue his brother from a craven robbery committed by the defendants,” said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz in a Thursday statement. “I hope the rest of the family can find peace in their sentencing.”
Margulis’ sentencing was announced by Katz on Thursday, and was the final step in a case delayed by court issues, holidays, COVID and a massive amount of evidence. The end result was potentially one of the longest murder trials in Queens history.
“I am glad to be done with it,” Margulis said on Thursday. “The defendants have been in jail for six years without a trial and so they received a trial even though it took a long time.”
“I believe I gave an appropriate sentence based on the facts of the case,” he added.
In March, Margulis said he believed it was the longest case in Queens history, or at least – quite a bit longer than your average murder trial.
“A murder case goes probably three weeks or so,” Margulis told the Eagle after Smith and Allen were convicted in March.
According to Margulis, the case even coming to trial took several years due to the pandemic, several attempts by the defendants to sever the case, as well as several changes of representation by both defendants.
“That slowed things down tremendously,” Margulis said in March. “During that time, as several other people's witnesses retired, they had to get them from out-of-state and other things like that.”
Allen and Smith each appeared in court nearly 100 times between October 2017 and this week. All told, it took six years and three months to reach the sentencing from the time of their arrests.
Once the case finally came to trial in December 2022, delays came with the New Year holiday, a bout of COVID for Judge Margulis and as he says, timing issues stemming from when the defendants arrived and had to leave the Queens Criminal Courthouse.
“I was asked if I could finish the trial by between 4:15 and 4:30 every day, because if I didn't, then defendants would not make the 5 p.m. bus,” he said.
The defendants would arrive at the courthouse around nine in the morning from Rikers Island, but the proceedings wouldn’t start until closer to 11.
“I could not get the defendants into the courtroom,” the judge said.
“They gave corrections problems, they didn’t give me any problems at all, but they had given corrections problems,” he added, also saying that they had over 3,500 pages of testimony, another reason the case dragged on.
DOC Commissioner Molina denied that delivering the defendants was an issue in a statement to the Eagle, and said that both Allen and Smith refused to go to court on several occasions.
“We know how important it is for people in custody to appear in court and we do all that we can to ensure that they are produced on time,” Molina said. “There were no delays in producing these detainees, and occurrences in which they did not arrive to their appointments on time were due to them refusing to attend and missing their transportation to court.”
The DOC began to see a dip in the number of defendants it produced for court during the pandemic. Though numbers have been on the rise over the past year, they have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels, according to DOC data.
