West Bloomfield Township, Mich. ? Nearly nine years ago, Desmon Venn threw a single punch at a high school classmate and put him in a coma. Venn pleaded guilty to assault, spent two months in a boot camp and figured he had paid his debt to society.

Last month, though, a new bill arrived.

Prosecutors brought involuntary manslaughter charges against Venn after the victim finally died of his injuries without ever coming out of his coma.

Venn, now 26, could get up to 15 years behind bars in the death of Zuhair Pattah.

Venn’s lawyer, Elbert Hatchett, said the charges violate Venn’s constitutional protection against double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same crime. He also said the state’s six-year window for filing an upgraded charge after such a crime has long since slammed shut.

“When they elected to prosecute him then, they forfeited the right to prosecute him thereafter for the same behavior,” Hatchett said.

John Skrzynski, an assistant Oakland County prosecutor who has handled the case from the beginning, said there is no double jeopardy because Pattah’s death generated a new crime, which also rules out any statute-of-limitations argument.

But Skrzynski, who successfully prosecuted assisted-suicide proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian for murder in 1999, said: “This is not an easy case. It’s a very difficult case. It’s a very sad case.”

Pattah was 16 and Venn 17 when Venn punched him between the eyes during a melee in the parking lot of West Bloomfield High in 1994. Pattah fell backward, hitting his head on the pavement with such force that his brain stem was severed.

In 1995, Venn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor aggravated assault. In addition to serving time in boot camp, he received two years of probation and was fined $1,000.

On Jan. 8, however, Pattah died at age 25 of what the medical examiner listed as complications from the head injury. Venn, now a restaurant worker in the Atlanta area, turned himself in after learning of the new charge. He was jailed on $250,000 bail.

No double jeopardy

Venn’s lawyer said he never warned his client about the possibility of new charges. “I always felt that once the original case had been adjudicated, it was not at all likely that they could bring a viable charge against him again,” Hatchett said.

Stephen J. Schulhofer, a law professor at New York University, said that such cases have occurred from time to time in other states, and that the federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the homicide charges do not constitute double jeopardy.

He said the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that double jeopardy exists only if the two crimes have the same elements. And in this case, death is an element of the manslaughter charge but not the assault charge.

Pattah, who was called Steve, was a Chaldean Catholic whose parents emigrated from Iraq to the United States about 30 years ago.

During the nearly nine years he lay in a coma, his deeply religious family never lost hope that one day he would wake up, said his sister, 22-year-old Lana Murad. They regularly dabbed holy water on his lips. They locked up his bedroom and left its contents untouched.

Murad and her parents stood vigil at Pattah’s bedside nearly every day, and she insists that he could hear and understand his visitors. When asked to squeeze a hand, his fingers would gently press into the flesh, she said; when he was told an emotional story, his always-open left eye would tear up.

Schoolyard brawl

Murad insisted Venn should be charged with murder, but the prosecutor said the evidence indicates Venn did not mean to badly hurt the victim.

According to prosecutors, the melee began after Pattah and another boy traded insults about their female relatives and acquaintances. Venn told authorities that he hit Pattah because he thought Pattah had struck him during the fray. Witnesses said Pattah did not hit him.

Though Pattah was Iraqi and Venn is black, the punch was not believed to be racially or culturally motivated. The high school is in affluent West Bloomfield Township, which is about 25 miles from Detroit and is a generally harmonious mix of races and religions.

Soon after Pattah was injured, the school system set up conflict-resolution programs to prevent similar tragedies.

After high school, Venn had more run-ins with the law. At the time he turned himself in, he was wanted on charges that included cocaine possession and driving with a suspended license. He was convicted of assaulting an Atlanta-area security guard in 2001.

Venn feels bad about what happened to Pattah and prays every night for his victim and his family, according to his lawyer, who would not allow a jailhouse interview with Venn.

“It’s been a haunting experience for him that he’ll never get over no matter what happens in the courts,” Hatchett said, “and it has had a significant impact on his life.”