Post by Logan on Feb 25, 2016 5:50:41 GMT -6
Prosecutors Want Kennedy Cousin Michael Skakel Back In Prison
HARTFORD — Prosecutors asked the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to send Michael Skakel back to prison, saying the judge who reversed his murder conviction in 2013 was wrong when he concluded that poor judgment and other errors by Skakel's original lawyer cost him a fair trial.
Skakel is accused of beating his teenage Greenwich neighbor, Martha Moxley, to death with a golf club in 1975, when both were 15 years old. A jury returned a surprise guilty verdict in 2002 and he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
It was the third time the Supreme Court has heard argument — Skakel lost the first two times — on a case that has been the subject of 40 years of continual investigation and litigation. Skakel became a tabloid staple because of his connection to the Kennedy family and the glimpse his trial provided at life among the well-to-do in a gated Greenwich community. He is a nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Dorothy Moxley, Martha's mother, attended the arguments and again faced a phalanx of television cameras as she walked into the court lobby, after more than an hour of often arcane legal argument, this time about whether Skakel was wrongly convicted of clubbing her daughter to death because his first lawyer bungled the defense.
Read more: www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-skakel-appeal-0225-20160224-story.html
HARTFORD — Prosecutors asked the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to send Michael Skakel back to prison, saying the judge who reversed his murder conviction in 2013 was wrong when he concluded that poor judgment and other errors by Skakel's original lawyer cost him a fair trial.
Skakel is accused of beating his teenage Greenwich neighbor, Martha Moxley, to death with a golf club in 1975, when both were 15 years old. A jury returned a surprise guilty verdict in 2002 and he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
It was the third time the Supreme Court has heard argument — Skakel lost the first two times — on a case that has been the subject of 40 years of continual investigation and litigation. Skakel became a tabloid staple because of his connection to the Kennedy family and the glimpse his trial provided at life among the well-to-do in a gated Greenwich community. He is a nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Dorothy Moxley, Martha's mother, attended the arguments and again faced a phalanx of television cameras as she walked into the court lobby, after more than an hour of often arcane legal argument, this time about whether Skakel was wrongly convicted of clubbing her daughter to death because his first lawyer bungled the defense.
Read more: www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-skakel-appeal-0225-20160224-story.html