Judge Sets Aside Conviction, Orders New Trial For Michael Skakel In Martha Moxley Murder
Source: The Hartford Courant
In a long and biting decision, a state judge on Wednesday set aside Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel's murder conviction and ordered his retrial in the 1975 death of Greenwich teenager Martha Moxley because of the glaring ineffectiveness of Skakel's original trial lawyer.
Judge Thomas Bishop devoted long stretches of his 136-page decision, dated Wednesday, to a harsh critique of Skakel's original trial lawyer Michael Sherman. Skakel is about halfway through a 20-year-to-life prison sentence for Moxley's murder.
" …defense counsel was in a myriad of ways ineffective," Bishop wrote. "The defense of a serious felony prosecution requires attention to detail, an energetic investigation and a coherent plan of defense capable executed. Trial counsel's failures in each of these areas of representation were significant and, ultimately, fatal to a constitutionally adequate defense."
"As a consequence of trial counsel's failures as stated, the state procured a judgment of conviction that lacks reliability," Bishop wrote. "Although defense counsel's errors of judgment and execution are not the fault of the state, a defendant's constitutional right to adequate representation cannot be overshadowed by the inconvenience and financial and emotional cost of a new trial. To conclude otherwise would be to elevate expediency over the constitutional rights we cherish."
Read more: http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-skakel-retrial-1024-20131023,0,7930940.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
What other high-profile cases might he be behind?
He evidently also wrote a book hinting that Terry Schiavo had been murdered, with the entire hospital and staff complicit, evidently. What a POS. 
edit: I vaguely remember that.
Regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s article ("In Defense of Michael Skakel"
, every morsel of exculpatory information relevant to the Skakel case was provided to the defense well in advance of trial. Attorney Michael Sherman was both relentless and thorough in his pursuit of all those matters at trial. What Kennedy avers in his lengthy diatribe consists, almost paragraph by paragraph, of distortions, facts taken out of context, half truths, nontruths, and Skakel family post-conviction revisionism.
At the same time, Kennedy chooses to either soft-pedal or ignore most of the state's most incriminating evidence. This, of course, results in a discounting of the cumulative effect of the state's case, which comes not the least from the thirteen separate witnesses to whom Skakel made either incriminating admissions or outright confessions. Kennedy also fails at even a pretense of a critical appraisal of the defense evidence, which, quite clearly, failed to impress the jury. My impression at trial was that the defense case was so lacking in credibility that our case actually built on it.
That Michael Skakel and his family are bewildered and angered at the conviction is hardly surprising. From the very night of this horrible crime they conducted themselves in the expectation that he would get away with murder. Thankfully, the State of Connecticut was able to thwart that expectation in a case tried fairly and truly.
Jonathan C. Benedict
State's Attorney
Bridgeport, Conn.
As Kenneth Littleton's attorney, I must respond to the inaccuracies and distortions contained in Robert Kennedy's article. Kennedy's attempt to point an accusatory finger at Littleton for the murder of Martha Moxley is unjustified, not only because it is erroneous but also because it unfairly seeks to use Littleton's subsequent emotional difficulties to somehow exonerate Michael Skakel, who was convicted of Moxley's murder.
Despite decades of law enforcement investigation, much of which took place with the cooperation of Littleton, no credible evidence has ever been developed that he was responsible for this ghastly murder, which occurred so soon after his employment by the Skakels.
Kennedy's scenario in which Littleton committed the murder in a drunken rage after Moxley refused his advances is absurd. I know of no evidence that Littleton was in an "alcoholic stupor" that evening. In addition, he was in the Skakel home with several members of the Skakel family and household staff, and friends. No information provided by any of these people in their various statements to the police over the years would suggest any unusual activities by Littleton during that evening. To postulate that Littleton, who never even saw Moxley, briefly left the house, beat her to death in a drunken rage, hid the body, and quickly returned to the house—without anyone's noticing anything unusual about his behavior or appearance—is preposterous.
Two additional points by Kennedy further illustrate the porosity of his argument. The composite sketch referenced in the article, of an individual seen in the vicinity that evening, is not of Kenneth Littleton, as Kennedy suggests, but of a neighborhood resident—as conclusively determined by the Greenwich Police Department years ago. Finally, the mysterious clothes, too large to fit any Skakel, found by a maid after the murder and apparently vigorously washed, were not Littleton's but Michael Skakel's. The police determined that he had borrowed them from someone at a camp the summer prior to the murder.
The case Kennedy presents against Littleton collapses when fact separates from fiction. Littleton has certainly had difficulties in the years since this tragedy. But none of these incidents would be admissible in any court to establish that he was responsible for this murder. Nor do they logically connect him to the murder—as Skakel's multiple admissions of killing Moxley connect him.
That a member of a family that has for so many years stood for the concept of fundamental fairness for all should choose to falsely attack an unfortunate and innocent man is regrettable.
Eugene J. Riccio
Bridgeport, Conn.
Though I admire Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s environmental work, I'm compelled to sprinkle some acid rain on his defense of Michael Skakel. Lack of space limits me to three areas of concern.
1) Ken Littleton, the Skakel tutor in 1975, once again finds himself in the role of scapegoat. Much of what Kennedy writes about him is either false or callously distorted. It is not true, for instance, that Littleton acknowledged having been in a drunken blackout on the night of the murder. Kennedy misinterprets a transcript in which Littleton referred to a blackout in 1984, during a car trip up the East Coast. The only person in this sad story prone to alcoholic blackouts in 1975 was Michael Skakel.
Littleton is an easy mark for people who, like the former state inspector Jack Solomon, see his mental illness as a manifestation of guilt. Improbably, Littleton's paranoia turned out to be justified. Until last summer's trial (which I attended, having written a book about the case in 1998 and wanting to see how it all turned out) Littleton spent a decade believing that he'd confessed to murdering Martha Moxley. How could this be? This is how: Littleton's ex-wife, acting at the behest of police investigators in 1992, told Littleton falsely that he had admitted to the crime during the alcohol-fueled delirium mentioned above. But the ruse failed to provoke the desired admission. "I said that?" was Littleton's bewildered reply. If the authorities truly believed that Littleton had said, for instance, "She wouldn't die. I had to stab her through the neck," they would have arrested him in no time flat—Inspector Solomon would have seen to it.
The notion that Littleton might be a serial killer was entertained seriously by only one man: Jack Solomon. Readers should not be fooled into thinking that Littleton was a viable suspect in other murders. And it is untrue that the Greenwich police detective Steve Carroll, whom I knew well, was anywhere near "convinced" of Littleton's guilt. Carroll leaned heavily toward Tom Skakel until, long after his retirement, evidence of Michael's involvement emerged. (My suspicions followed a similar route.)
Kennedy writes accurately that the police lost a well-scrubbed pair of dungarees, but they most certainly did not belong to Littleton, as Kennedy implies. Their provenance begins with a William Matthai, who gave them (name sewn in) to a fellow summer camper in New Hampshire: Michael Skakel. Finally, the police sketch that Kennedy describes as a "dead ringer" for Littleton—it is a pretty good likeness—also bears a strong resemblance to a neighbor known to be out walking that night.
Kennedy sometimes trips on his own reasoning. He argues, credibly, that the murder occurred around 10:00 P.M., and then puts Littleton in the Skakel kitchen at that hour. And since Kennedy acknowledges that Tom Skakel was with Martha Moxley until 9:50 and with Littleton from about 10:00 to 10:30, he all but rules out Littleton himself. (Those who would accept that a ten-minute window was sufficient for Littleton to zip out and savagely kill a girl he did not know must grapple with Julie Skakel's observation that at 10:00 Littleton seemed altogether normal—not "inflamed and in an alcoholic stupor."
Kennedy notes (parenthetically but tellingly) that most of the Skakels say they believe the best evidence points not to Littleton but to the family gardener, Franz Wittine, who is conveniently dead. If Wittine was the monster that Kennedy describes, why did the Skakels sound no alarm in 1975?
2) Kennedy praises Michael's life of sobriety, attained in 1982, but seems mostly ignorant of his calamitous teen years. Let me help. Contrary to Kennedy's suggestion of mental soundness, Michael seemed in the grip of "a severe agitated depression . . . possibly of psychotic proportions," according to Sue Wallington Quinlan, a psychiatrist who examined him in 1977. "There is also great fury inside him focused primarily in hatred for his father," Quinlan wrote in her report. "This anger is very frightening . . ." One year later Michael led the police in Windham, New York, on a wild car chase that ended at the base of a telephone pole. (Kennedy demotes this to "a drunken car accident." Thomas Sheridan, the family lawyer, observed at the time that Michael was "obviously a disturbed person" who "showed little or no remorse for having nearly killed the companion in his car . . . his only comment was 'Next time I won't get caught.'"
3) Kennedy's fixation on Dominick Dunne leads him to the unwarranted belief that the writer held the defense lawyer Mickey Sherman in his thrall and at the same time—through his "protégé" Mark Fuhrman—pressured Connecticut authorities to "indict a Skakel." In reality Sherman wasted few chances to attack Dunne's claims, and Michael Skakel wandered into Connecticut's crosshairs long before any "Fuhrman-Dunne view" could have coalesced. Inspector Frank Garr discovered in 1995 that Michael was now placing himself at the crime scene, and in 1996 that he had made damaging admissions to fellow denizens of Elan. (Kennedy dismisses the Elanites as "crackpots" eager to point a finger, but some who testified were, and remain, sympathetic to Michael. Two such people recall Michael's saying that either he or his brother Tom killed Martha Moxley; he couldn't remember, owing to his blackout.) At the time of Garr's discoveries Fuhrman had yet to hear Michael Skakel's name, though he would advance a very public case against him in 1998.
Kennedy does make some worthwhile points. The national press corps did little independent investigation despite lavish attention to the case, and TV "experts" perpetuated errors at a discouraging rate. I also grant Kennedy that the case against Michael was less than airtight. (I had expected a hung jury.) But in the end his defense of Michael Skakel, replete with errors, distortions, and clever hairsplitting, is of little authentic value to readers, much less to Skakel himself.
Timothy Dumas
Greenwich, Conn.
gave Skakel a good defense. You said:
"Regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s article ("In Defense of Michael Skakel" , every morsel of exculpatory information relevant to the Skakel case was provided to the defense well in advance of trial. Attorney Michael Sherman was both relentless and thorough in his pursuit of all those matters at trial."
Regardless of what information the prosecution provided to Sherman, Sherman provided a poor defense, particularly with regard to his alibi -- such a poor defense that the judge has ordered a new trial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/nyregion/skakel-gets-new-trial-in-75-killing-of-teenager-in-connecticut.html
Judge Bishop said Mr. Sherman had been “in a myriad of ways ineffective” as Mr. Skakel’s lawyer.
“The defense of a serious felony prosecution requires attention to detail, an energetic investigation and a coherent plan of defense” that is capably executed, the judge wrote. “Trial counsel’s failures in each of these areas of representation were significant and, ultimately, fatal to a constitutionally adequate defense. As a consequence of trial counsel’s failures as stated, the state procured a judgment of conviction that lacks reliability.”
SNIP
In seeking a new trial, Mr. Skakel and his lawyers claimed that Mr. Sherman failed to provide adequate representation. Among other things, Mr. Skakel accused Mr. Sherman of failing to pursue an alibi defense; failing to rebut the testimony of two schoolmates who maintained that Mr. Skakel had admitted to the murder; and failing to prepare an effective closing argument, a lapse Judge Bishop called “both inadequate and improper.”
“His argument was, in the main, an unfocused running commentary on the state’s evidence,” the judge wrote, adding that Mr. Sherman had failed to mention the notion of reasonable doubt. “Attorney Sherman’s argument did not provide the jury with any template for decision making,” the judge noted.
http://articles.courant.com/2013-10-24/news/hc-ed-skakel-new-trial-20131024_1_thomas-skakel-state-witness-attorney-sherman
Michael Skakel had an alibi — he was at his cousin's house at the time of the killing — but Mr. Sherman didn't pursue a witness, a psychologist visiting the home that night.
Finally, a state witness named Gregory Coleman said Michael Skakel told him he committed the crime. Three witnesses could have refuted the testimony, but Mr. Sherman chose not to call them.
So, good work on the part of Michael Skakel's habeas lawyers, Hubert Santos and Hope Seeley. Mr. Santos is applying for Michael Skakel's release from prison where, according to sources, he has been a model inmate.
We are left to wonder whether the authorities arrested the wrong brother.
