Tuesday, September 29, 2009
ERIE, Pa. (AP) — An Erie woman has a new attorney to defend criminal charges that she masterminded of a bank robbery plot that ended with a pizza deliveryman being killed by a bomb locked around his neck.
Sixty-year-old Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s new attorney is Douglas Sughrue of Pittsburgh.
Sughrue’s Web site says he is “aggressive” something that Diehl-Armstrong said her federal public defender, Thomas Patton, was not. Patton and Armstrong had disagreed on many aspects of her case including, at times, her mental competency.
A judge found her competent last week, about a year after ruling she was too mentally ill to participate in her own defense.
Diehl-Armstrong says she’s innocent of planning the 2003 robbery that killed 43-year-old Brian Wells.