UPDATE at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, April 14, 2023: Mark Jensen was once again sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife, Julie Jensen, by poisoning her with antifreeze at their Pleasant Prairie home in 1998.
Twice-convicted murderer Mark Jensen will be sentenced for the second time for the murder of his wife Julie Jensen on Friday, April 14.
The case began on December 3, 1998, when Julie Jensen was found dead in her bed in Pleasant Prairie from antifreeze poisoning.
Mark was immediately suspected in her death and questioned by police. He claimed that Julie was depressed and may have committed suicide, but the detective questioning him showed him a letter, written by Julie and given to police days earlier.
That letter implicated Mark as her number one suspect should anything happen to her, and would become the centerpiece of the initial case against Mark.
In 2008, he went on trial for first-degree intentional homicide. In addition to the letter, which was questioned by the defense as an attempt to frame Mark from beyond the grave after Julie’s suicide, prosecutors focused on an affair that Mark had been having with a woman he would later marry in the years after Julie’s death.
The letter’s use was legally controversial as well: similar evidence has been blocked from court based on criminal defendants’ rights to confront their own accusers under the Sixth Amendment.
But the Wisconsin Supreme Court used a United States Supreme Court Ruling, Crawford v Washington ruling to allow the letter based on the “forfeiture by wrongdoing” doctrine – under which a defendant waives his right to confront a witness if he caused the witness to be absent.
In Mark Jensen’s case, it was by poisoning his wife with antifreeze and Ambien. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in February 2008.
Instead of being the end of the story, the verdict was only the beginning of a long and complicated appeals process focused on whether the letter should have been admitted into evidence.
In 2013, a federal judge overturned Jensen’s conviction, a decision that was upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Prosecutors were determined to try him again, but in 2015 Kenosha Circuit Judge Chad Kerkman reinstated Mark Jensen’s conviction. That decision was also reversed on appeal, a ruling upheld in March 2021 by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
With the letter ruled inadmissible and Mark Jensen no longer a convicted murderer, prosecutors prepared to try him again now more than 20 years after Julie’s death. This included original Kenosha County prosecutor Bob Jambois, who rejoined the team as a special prosecutor.
Jensen’s trial in 2023 lasted three weeks and focused on his internet history – his emails to his affair partner and now ex-wife Kelly Brooks and his search history showing research into poisoning. The defense again claimed that Julie had committed suicide.
More than 24 years after the case began, Mark Jensen was again convicted by a jury of Julie’s murder on February 1, 2023.
Jensen will again face a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He is now 63 years old.
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