A scheduled March 22 trial is expected to be delayed while lawyers argue a motion filed Thursday in the case.
The grisly murder last August stunned the Marshall Islands, where murder remains a rare occurrence though spouse abuse is rampant. Morton Makroro, 54, is accused of murdering his wife by stabbing her multiple times during a domestic altercation in Majuro. He has been held in jail since last August awaiting trial.
This murder provoked the only public demonstration in Majuro during 2010, when several hundred people marched through Majuro to the High Court demanding the government step up action to prevent spouse abuse.
“Marshallese women face hurdles in addressing a high incidence of domestic violence,” Daisy Alik-Momotaro, the executive director of the national women’s organization Women United Together Marshall Islands, told the United Nations conference on the status of women on Monday this week in New York.
She said there is an urgent “need to upscale national action against domestic violence, to build matrilineal system capacities, to boost education opportunities for women, and to further open the door to economic participation.”
Makroro’s attorney has asked the High Court to approve his plan to use an “insanity” defense in his upcoming murder trial.
At the time of the murder, Makroro’s wife Emson was a teacher at the College of the Marshall Islands and had just obtained her master’s degree from the University of Guam. High Court records show the low-level of murders in the Marshall Islands: there were only three murders or attempted murders prosecuted in 2010 and just one the previous year.
Assistant Public Defender Karotu Tiba asked Judge James Plasman to take the scheduled March 22 trial off calendar to allow time for consideration of his motion regarding the proposed insanity defense, even though he missed Plasman’s Feb. 14 deadline for requesting it.
After discussions with Makroro, Tiba said he “discovered that there is reasonable belief that defendant was suffering from a mental defect at the time defendant committed the crime thus rendering him unable to know or understand what he was doing.”
Tiba described Makroro as “incapable because of his mental condition,” and requested the court’s approval for having Makroro¹s “mental competency” evaluated by professionals.
Following a pre-trial conference on Jan. 31, Judge Plasman had set Feb. 14 as the deadline for defense motions.
