Man awaiting second trial in 2008 St. Charles slaying
By Dan Campana For The Beacon-News October 19, 2012 4:52PM
Arthur Manning
Updated: November 22, 2012 6:38AM
It took only nine months for Arthur Manning to be charged, convicted and sentenced in the 2008 stabbing death of a St. Charles man.
The road to a second trial for Manning — who had his conviction overturned by an appellate court in 2011 but remains in jail today — will extend at least into the new year, according to prosecutors.
Manning, 61, appeared in Kane County Court recently for a status hearing. When he returns to a courtroom in December, it will be with a new judge handling the case.
Judge Timothy Sheldon, who is retiring at the beginning of December, presided over Manning’s 2009 trial where a jury convicted him of killing 28-year-old Naromi Mannery during a September 2008 fight outside a home on West Main Street in St. Charles. Manning told police he stabbed a drunken Mannery after he refused to leave the home owned by carnival company Windy City Amusement. Manning and two other men confronted Mannery, who punched Manning and then hit him with a “football tackle,” according to court records.
“When we started fighting I had a knife. Now when he came to me, I stabbed him in the shoulder. Then the next thing I know we started fighting. He backed off,” Manning testified at his trial. “I thought he was gonna throw up his hand and say I’m finished, man, I don’t want no more. But this time he hit me like a football player across me in my stomach.
“... When he picked me up he try to power drop me into the cement, but I wound up sticking him in the back,” Manning testified.
In a videotaped interview with police, which jurors saw, Manning told a detective, “When he hit me, I just lost it. I stabbed him because I was angry.”
Later, he added, “I don’t like to stop until somebody ... goes to the hospital or somebody goes to the grave,” according to court records.
Sheldon sentenced Manning to 29 years in prison after rejecting motions for a new trial and to reconsider the prison sentence. Manning’s attorneys contended jurors should have been able to consider second-degree murder based on self-defense, but Sheldon only gave the jury an option to find Manning guilty of second-degree murder.
The appellate panel found Sheldon erred by not giving jurors a self-defense instruction.
“Generally, it is appropriate to instruct the jury on defense theories supported by the evidence at trial, even if it is only slight,” the appellate court said. “We find that there was slight evidence, as noted by (Sheldon), to support the giving of a self-defense instruction.”
With his conviction overturned, Manning was returned to the Kane County jail in January when his $1 million bond was reinstated.
Guy Manning, Arthur Manning’s brother, and Willie Wimberly each received an eight-year sentence for aggravated battery in connection to the murder. Guy Manning was released from prison in December and will see his parole end later this year, while Wimberly was paroled in June.
A fourth man was charged with obstruction of justice after police learned he tired to wash Mannery’s blood off the sidewalk in front of the Windy City home.
