Woman withdraws her petition in appeal of murder conviction

A former Carthage woman convicted of killing her 3-year-old daughter in 2005 has dropped a federal claim that she is being unlawfully detained in prison.

Mandi T. Griffin, 30, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court in September, claiming, among other things, that no expert testimony was presented on her behalf during a six-day trial in Jefferson County Court in December 2005.

She asked March 1 to have the petition dismissed because she still has a motion pending in County Court to have her conviction and sentence of 22 years to life vacated. Based on her not having exhausted her state remedies, Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy granted the dismissal Tuesday.

A jury found Griffin guilty of second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter and second-degree assault, all felonies, and a misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child in connection with the February 2005 beating death of her daughter, Vanessa, who had cerebral palsy.

Trial testimony revealed that Vanessa Griffin died after her head was repeatedly banged against a wooden portion of a couch at her Carthage apartment. After the beating, Griffin placed the child face down on a bed because she did not want to hear the child scream. While the child was on the bed, Griffin left her alone while she exercised in the living room and then took a two-hour bath instead of seeking medical attention for her. A medical examiner testified that the child had been dead for three to five hours before she was brought to the emergency room at Carthage Area Hospital.

Griffin claimed in her federal motion that a County Court motion to have a forensic pathologist review her daughter's autopsy was granted, but no medical expert was called to testify regarding the findings.

She also claimed, among other things, that her attorney, Senior Assistant Public Defender Laurel A. McCarthy, did not investigate an alternative cause of death for her daughter and did not present any evidence from a toxicology report conducted on the child.

Based on these allegations, Griffin claimed she was being unlawfully held at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a claim that was dismissed "without prejudice" by Judge McAvoy.

Griffin previously made similar claims of ineffective counsel to the state Appellate Division, Fourth Department, which rejected the claims and affirmed her conviction and sentence in February 2008.