SMETHPORT – Testimony and evidence presentation ended Wednesday
afternoon in the interrupted hearing on whether James McMahon
should get a new trial.

McKean County President Judge John Cleland gave defense attorney
Greg Henry 30 days from the time he receives the hearing transcript
to file a brief with his arguments on why Dennis Luttenauer of
Kane, who defended McMahon in his 2001 murder trial, was
ineffective in not using a defense of voluntary intoxication to
convince the jury to convict McMahon of third-degree homicide
rather than first degree.

The first-degree verdict carried with it a mandatory life
sentence, which McMahon is now serving in Smithfield Correctional
Institution.

The hearing began Feb. 14 with several witnesses testifying that
McMahon had been drinking all day before he stabbed Link Dowell on
March 8, 2001.

Luttenauer was on the stand explaining why he had not used the
defense when District Attorney John Pavlock became ill, and the
hearing was adjourned.

The Kane attorney was back on the stand Wednesday, as McMahon’s
new attorney quizzed him on what his idea of the intoxication
defense was and whether he had adequately explained it to
McMahon.

Luttenauer testified that he had talked with McMahon about that
defense when he first was appointed to defend him and again during
the trial, but that McMahon had insisted that he was not drunk when
he stabbed Dowell in the bar of the Bradford Hotel.

Pavlock brought out that McMahon never raised the question of
intoxication until after his other appeal was denied by the
Pennsylvania Superior Court and that, while he had written several
letters to Luttenauer before and after the trial, none of them
mentioned his being drunk.

Answering Pavlock’s questions, McMahon admitted to being a heavy
drinker at the time, saying that “When I drank, I drank.”

He scoffed at Luttenauer’s statement that McMahon had said he
drank perhaps four beers, some wine and three or four rum and cokes
in the about 12 hours before the killing – “I drank that much in an
hour,” he told the court.

He said that Luttenauer wanted to know how much he had drunk,
but he did not know, so he estimated – “I gave him a number.”

McMahon testified that he told Luttenauer that he’d been
drinking for 12 hours, and that “I was drunk.”

He contradicted the attorney’s assertions that they had talked
several times about an intoxication defense. He also said that he
told the Luttenauer that “Didn’t mean it … what I did.”

The only other witness Wednesday was Susan Collins, a secretary
in the Public Defender’s office, who testified that she had
interviewed McMahon at the McKean County Jail the day after he was
arrested and that the notes entered into evidence were hers.

Cleland will review the evidence, which includes letters between
Luttenauer and McMahon, and read the arguments that Henry and
Pavlock submit before making a decision on whether McMahon deserves
a new trial.

Wednesday’s hearing came exactly five years after Dowell’s
death.