The case is notable for the eventual admission into evidence of a letter written by the deceased prior to her death expressing suspicion of her husband's intentions.
"[2] In 2008, Mark Jensen was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,[3] a verdict which was overturned in 2015.
The couple moved to the Carol Beach neighborhood of Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin and had two children, David and Douglas, aged 8 and 3 at the time of Julie's death.
The full text of the letter is as follows:[6] Special Prosecutor Robert Jambois contended that Mark Jensen poisoned his wife Julie, then 40, with ethylene glycol (antifreeze) and then suffocated her while she was barely breathing in their marital bed in Pleasant Prairie on December 3, 1998.
[8] The letter's use by the prosecutors was controversial, because such evidence has been blocked from court for years by strict hearsay rules based on criminal defendants' rights to confront their accusers under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The court agreed with Jensen's argument that the state's use of his dead wife's words violated his Constitutional right to confront witnesses testifying against him.
[14] On February 26, 2020, Wisconsin's Court of Appeals, District II, issued a summary disposition reversing Judge Kerkman's decision to reinstate the conviction.