A Pearl City man convicted of fatally stabbing his roommate and setting fire to the apartment they shared is headed back to trial after Hawaii’s Intermediate Court of Appeals threw out his murder and arson convictions, ruling that the prosecutor’s closing arguments crossed legal lines. Scott David DeAngelo, now 36 and working as a mechanic, was originally sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for second-degree murder and a concurrent 20 years for first-degree arson after a jury found he killed 33-year-old Demond Cox in February 2022. He remains held without bail at the Oahu Community Correctional Center while the case heads back to Circuit Judge Kevin Souza’s courtroom.
According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the appellate panel of Clyde Wadsworth, Sonja McCullen and Kimberly Guidry found that Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Brian Vincent repeatedly used the phrase “we know” — 25 times across closing and rebuttal arguments — to assert facts that were not actually supported by the evidence. The court also flagged Vincent’s use of “we don’t know” at least once in a similar context. The judges wrote that the pervasive phrasing risked offering the jury the prosecutor’s personal opinions dressed up as established fact, according to FindLaw’s summary of the appellate ruling.
What Happened Inside the Burning Apartment
DeAngelo testified as the only defense witness at trial, telling jurors he stabbed Cox in self-defense after Cox allegedly set the apartment on fire and attacked him with a handgun, per the appellate record. He admitted to stabbing Cox in the neck and to setting the fire at the rented fourth-floor unit on Lehua Avenue, then jumped from the burning apartment’s window and fled in Cox’s car. Police arrested him the next day in Hauʻula, on Oahu’s Windward side, in possession of a handgun.
Prosecutors told the jury that DeAngelo pulled the gun on Cox and tried to kill him with it before the stabbing — but the appeals court concluded that the evidence did not actually connect DeAngelo’s gun possession to any inference that he tried to shoot Cox. Two witnesses reportedly saw DeAngelo with a gun, and the defense conceded he had one in his hand at several points, but the panel found the prosecutor’s specific claim that he pulled it on Cox to kill him was not backed by proof at trial.
A Landlord-Tenant Dispute Turned Deadly
The case centered on a soured subletting arrangement. Cox had tried to end the arrangement with DeAngelo well in advance of the killing, and a message Cox sent his aunt on January 10, 2022, indicated he planned to give DeAngelo a target move-out date. Prosecutors argued that date should have been February 7, 2022 — the same day Cox died — but the appellate court found that specific claim improper as well, since it was not clearly established by the evidence presented at trial…