A state appeals court panel on Tuesday rejected arguments from Gregory Banks that he failed to receive a fair trial for the killing of Deanna Banks, 36, outside the Calvin Coolidge Elementary School in December 2003. Banks, now 57 and serving a prison sentence of life plus 25 years, claimed in his appeal that he had an ineffective trial counsel and had an adversarial relationship with his trial lawyer...
During the trial, witnesses testified to seeing Banks and his wife arguing outside the school on Dec. 1, 2003. The couple had been married 15 months, but Deanne Banks had obtained a restraining order against her husband weeks before the confrontation outside the school.
Banks dragged his wife from her car into his van where he strangled her, authorities said. They said he then drove to a wooded area near the Bonnie Brae Residential Treatment Center for Adolescent Boys in Bernards Township, where he buried her body.
