Four days after a jury found Brian Pirraglia guilty of killing Brian O’Shea with a lethal dose of fentanyl, for which he was sentenced to life in prison, Pirraglia’s attorney filed an emergency motion for a new trial on three ground, including an allegation that one of the jurors was not a Flagler County resident and was therefore improperly seated.
Pirraglia was found guilty by a 12-member jury on Nov. 21.
Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols today denied the motion after a brief hearing Pirraglia joined the briefing by phone from the Central Florida Reception Center, an Orlando state prison where new inmates are booked and classified before being dispersed to their more permanent prison assignment elsewhere in the state.
Donna Peterson of Jacksonville’s Peterson Law argued the motion in the courtroom. She claimed juror ineligibility and misconduct based on documents she submitted to the court indicating that the juror has a Volusia County address and voted in Volusia County in August 2024.
Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis, the prosecutor in the case, told the court in a response that the defense “filed a factually incorrect motion that is not supported by any legal documentation,” and that it was based on a “private investigator open-source document” that is neither an official government source nor a legally admissible one in court.
The juror was not a Volusia County resident. Rather, he is a resident of areas at the south end of the county, such as Hunters Ridge or areas near Old Dixie Highway, that are geographically in Flagler County, but whose residents have an Ormond Beach address. “A simple search under public resources provided by official public entities would reveal that the address for [the juror] is actually in Flagler County,” the state responded. The state provided the court the juror’s driving and property records as well as his Flagler County voter registration.
Pirraglia’s motion “must be denied on its face,” the state argued–and it was.
Peterson also argued that, based on a question the jury posed the judge during deliberations, the verdict was contrary to the weight of the evidence. The law makes an individual liable for another person’s overdose death if the individual is found to have “distributed” the drug, though the law leaves the exact meaning of “distribution” undefined. It has generally been interpreted to apply to dealers, as was the original intent of the first version of the law in 1972. It has since been interpreted more expansively by state attorneys and prosecutors.
Jurors in the Pirraglia case had asked: “is it distribution if [O’Shea, the victim] found the drugs in the house just because the home belongs to Brian Pirraglia?” The question signaled that jurors may not have been sure if Pirraglia himself had either acquired the drugs or had himself administered the dose. The state argued he did both, relying on what a witness, Cody Iglesias, had told detectives immediately after Iglesias was charged and incarcerated on unrelated charges.
Iglesias claimed Pirraglia told him he had injected O’Shea. But while Iglesias in his deposition did say that Pirraglia had injected O’Shea, Pirraglia had also described to him that O’Shea was already woozy from drugs, and couldn’t bring himself to inject himself. O’Shea’s woozy state had never been made clear to the jury during the trial. In other words, O’Shea may have already been very high when he was injected with fentanyl.
“I do remember him telling me that Brian O’Shea couldn’t shoot himself up because he was already–he was shaking a lot from doing drugs,” Iglesias had said in his deposition, “and he was poking himself and he was bleeding everywhere. And then, Brian Pirraglia shot up O’Shea. And then, O’Shea went out of it, hit his head on a speaker. And for a while there, Brian thought that he was like, knocked out. But he was obviously overdosing. And before he called the ambulance, the 911 line, he robbed him for his money that he had saved up from when he was in jail.”
O’Shea hadn’t saved up that money. It had been wired to him from his mother that very day: he had gotten out of jail that morning after a stint of several months for a previous possession charge.
None of that could be re-litigated today–only the defense’s claims that the jury verdict went against the evidence. But that’s the equivalent of asking the judge to overturn a jury’s verdict. It’s not unheard of. But it’s rare, and in Flagler County criminal court, unheard of.
The same principle applies to the defense’s third claim–a technical argument that accuses the judge of making an error when she allowed the Williams Rule of evidence to apply. The Williams Rule allows the introduction of evidence of wrongdoing not directly related to the case at hand to show prior bad acts by the defendants. The Williams Rule is introduced more often than not in Flagler’s felony court. The judge denied the claim.
Appeals are not over. There is an automatic appeal filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. It will likely be followed by several additional appeals.
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