Julie Jensen case
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The Julie Jensen case involves the murder of a woman named Julie Jensen by her husband Mark Jensen.
Prosecutors contended that Mark Jensen poisoned his wife, then 40, with antifreeze and then suffocated her in 1998, but the defense argued that Julie Jensen was a depressed woman who killed herself and framed her husband.
Julie Jensen investigated her husband, checking his planner, photographing a note and documenting her suspicions. The handwritten letter in which she addressed notes about drugs and alcohol her husband had written. The woman gave the letter to a neighbor with instructions to hand it to police if anything happened to her. She wrote that she would never commit suicide and that if she died, police should consider her husband a suspect.
The letter's use by the prosecutors was controversial, because such evidence has been blocked from court for years by strict hearsay rules giving criminal defendants the right to confront their accusers. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court, guided by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, created a hearsay exception that permitted the use of Julie Jensen's letter and statements as a dying declaration: evidence of her state of mind at the time of her death.
The letter was the critical factor in the trial that ended in Wisconsin on February 22, 2008. Jensen, 48, was found guilty of his wife's murder after more than 30 hours of deliberations. He was sentenced February 27, 2008. to life in prison with no chance of parole. [1] [2]
