Bryan Anthony James faces sentencing after prosecutors said his internet history undermined his claim that he mistook his wife for an intruder.

YPSILANTI TOWNSHIP, Mich. — A Michigan man who said he fatally shot his wife after mistaking her for an intruder has pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, ending the prospect of another trial more than seven years after the killing and putting the case on course for sentencing in October.

Bryan Anthony James entered the plea in the death of 31-year-old Ashley James, according to court records and reports on the case. The shooting happened in the early morning of July 11, 2019, inside the couple’s Ypsilanti Township home. James was scheduled to face another trial on an open murder charge before entering the plea. His sentencing is set for Oct. 19. Under Michigan law, second-degree murder is punishable by life in prison or any term of years, leaving the sentence for the court to determine. The plea marks the most significant resolution yet in a case that already produced a full jury trial, an unannounced verdict and an unusual decision by a judge to set that verdict aside before it was read in court.

A central part of the prosecution’s case was evidence that investigators found on James’ electronic devices. Detectives testified during the 2022 proceedings that James had searched for information about Oscar Pistorius on June 3, 2019, a little more than a month before Ashley James was killed. Pistorius, the South African Paralympic runner, had become the subject of worldwide attention after he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in 2013 and said he believed an intruder was inside his home. Prosecutors in the Michigan case argued that the timing and subject of James’ search were significant because his own explanation after his wife’s death also centered on a supposed intruder. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Lou Danner argued at the 2022 trial that James had studied the Pistorius case and was trying to avoid mistakes that had hurt Pistorius’ defense.

The shooting itself was not disputed. Authorities said Ashley James had gone to the bathroom and was returning to the bedroom when Bryan James fired a .40-caliber handgun. Prosecutors said she was struck once in the chest and died shortly afterward. James told investigators that he believed the person entering the room was an intruder, an account that initially shaped public understanding of the shooting. When local television station WJBK reported on the death in July 2019, relatives described the couple as loving and expressed hope that the shooting had been a terrible mistake. Ashley James’ cousin, Carnae Sanders, said the family had not known the couple to argue and was focused on caring for their two young children. At that early stage, charges had not yet been filed and investigators were still examining what happened.

Prosecutors later presented a sharply different account of the marriage and the events surrounding Ashley James’ death. During the 2022 trial, Danner argued that Bryan James wanted a way out of the relationship without going through a divorce or custody dispute involving the couple’s children. The prosecution also pointed to conduct after the shooting, saying James collected about $70,000 in life insurance and created a Tinder profile less than a month after his wife died. Those facts, prosecutors argued, were not isolated pieces of evidence but part of a broader circumstantial case that the shooting was intentional rather than the result of a frightened mistake. The state’s theory depended on drawing connections among James’ internet activity, the circumstances of the shooting and his actions afterward, rather than on a witness who claimed to have seen him deliberately fire at Ashley.

James’ defense disputed that interpretation. Attorney Adam Clements told jurors during the earlier trial that Ashley James’ death was a tragic accident and accused prosecutors of selecting facts that fit a murder theory while discounting evidence of a close marriage. The defense described the couple as soulmates and argued that James did not stand to gain in the way the prosecution suggested. The conflicting accounts left jurors in 2022 to decide whether the intruder explanation was credible or whether the state had proved an intentional killing. They ultimately reached a verdict, but the public never learned what that verdict was. Before it could be announced, the trial judge learned that jurors had mistakenly been given evidence that had not been admitted during the proceedings. The verdict was thrown out, leaving the prosecution to continue the case.

The failed verdict became an unusual turning point in an already complicated prosecution. Rather than producing either a conviction or an acquittal, the 2022 trial ended without a valid final judgment after days of testimony and argument. A Michigan Court of Appeals record from that period also shows litigation in the case under docket number 360210, with a delayed application for leave to appeal denied in March 2022. The case nevertheless remained active. By 2026, James was preparing to return to trial on an open murder charge, meaning the degree of any murder conviction could have been decided through the court process. His no-contest plea to second-degree murder removed the need for that trial and established the offense on which he will be sentenced.

The Pistorius comparison formed one of the most distinctive threads in the Michigan prosecution, but the two criminal cases followed separate legal systems and different factual paths. Pistorius said he believed an intruder was in a toilet cubicle inside his Pretoria home when he fired through the door on Feb. 14, 2013, killing Steenkamp. A South African trial court initially convicted him of culpable homicide, but the country’s Supreme Court of Appeal later overturned that result and convicted him of murder. James’ prosecutors did not rely on Pistorius’ case as proof by itself. Instead, they used evidence of James’ pre-shooting search as part of their argument about planning, knowledge and the credibility of his later explanation. The importance of that evidence was contested by the defense, which rejected the prosecution’s effort to turn the search history into evidence of intent.

The long gap between the July 2019 shooting and the 2026 plea also shows how the case changed over time. Immediately after Ashley James’ death, relatives and neighbors were reacting to an account in which a husband had apparently made a catastrophic mistake. By the time prosecutors presented their case to a jury in 2022, they were arguing that the same explanation was part of an intentional plan. Then, after the jury’s verdict was invalidated because of the evidence error, the case remained unresolved for several more years. The eventual plea does not require the court to conduct another full trial over those competing narratives. It does, however, leave the judge to decide the punishment for second-degree murder while considering the record developed over years of investigation and litigation.

A no-contest plea allows a criminal case to proceed to conviction and sentencing without the defendant making the same formal admission of guilt associated with a guilty plea. In practical terms, James now faces sentencing for second-degree murder rather than a new jury determination on the open murder charge. Michigan’s second-degree murder statute gives courts broad sentencing authority, allowing imprisonment for life or for a term of years. No sentence had been imposed as of Sept. 28, and reports identifying Oct. 19 as the sentencing date remain the latest verified information. That distinction is important because some online descriptions of the case use language suggesting that James has already received his punishment, while the available court reporting shows that sentencing is still ahead.

Ashley James was a mother of two who had been with Bryan James for about 13 years and married to him for five, according to reporting from the earlier trial. Her death first reached the public as an apparent mistaken-identity shooting, then became the subject of a murder prosecution built partly around digital evidence and competing accounts of the marriage. Seven years later, the case has moved from disputed trial theories to a second-degree murder plea, but its final court-imposed punishment has not yet been decided. James is scheduled to return to court Oct. 19 for sentencing.

Author note: Last updated September 28, 2026.