Court upholds Robert Ferrante's cyanide poisoning conviction

A Pennsylvania appeals court has upheld Dr. Robert Ferrante's conviction for poisoning his wife with cyanide, rejecting arguments that a lab's evidence should have been excluded and that Dr. Autumn Klein couldn't have been poisoned if a transplant recipient was still living with her liver.

Ferrante, 69, was convicted in 2014 of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for killing Klein, 41, with a fatal dose of cyanide hidden in creatine supplements she took for fertility.

Defense Attorney Chris Rand Eyster had argued in October that Ferrante received a letter in prison proving Klein, a UPMC doctor, could not have been poisoned because a transplant recipient with Klein's liver was still alive and healthy four years later.

“The person who received Autumn Klein's liver is a living testament to the fact that Klein did not die of cyanide poisoning,” Eyster wrote in his brief.

The recipient had written a letter expressing “the greatest amount of sympathy for your loved one's passing,” which the organization that facilitated the transplant then forwarded to Ferrante in prison.

But in the 18-page opinion authored by Senior Judge John Musmanno, the court ruled that the letter didn't count as “new evidence” since Ferrante's lawyers had told the jury at his trial that Klein's liver and a kidney had been harvested and tested, showing no signs of cyanide.

“Our review of the record discloses that the evidence related to Dr. Klein's transplanted organ is not ‘newly discovered,' but cumulative to other evidence presented at trial,” Musmanno wrote in the court's opinion. “The letter from a transplant recipient, regarding the condition of his/her organ, is merely cumulative of the results of the (transplant group's) test.”

Eyster had argued that the prosecution withheld evidence that Quest Diagnostics — the lab that concluded Klein's blood had cyanide in it — was tied to a subsidiary that had been convicted in federal court of misrepresenting other lab results.

In its opinion, the court said nothing indicated prosecutors knew of the company's conviction for misbranding, and Ferrante or his lawyers had the same access to information about that conviction that prosecutors did. Even if the state had a duty to find and disclose that information, Ferrante's case wouldn't have been affected because the conviction involved a different test for a different substance.

Eyster said he was relieved that the court at least acknowledged that Quest and the subsidiary were one and the same, since he believed that a jury hearing about the company's conviction would be less inclined to trust Quest's test results.

Quest was the only laboratory to measure significant quantities of cyanide in Klein's blood. Prosecutors used those test results, along with Ferrante's internet searches for information on cyanide poisoning and the fact that he'd ordered a bottle through his lab at UPMC just before Klein's death, to convince jurors he was guilty.

Eyster said he intended to appeal the decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and if they decline to hear the case, will move ahead with more post-conviction relief in the lower courts challenging Quest's test results.

“We still think those numbers are bad,” he said. “Our position is that evidence should not have been admitted at trial.”

Matthew Santoni is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724 836 6660, msantoni@tribweb.com or on Twitter @msantoni.