Skakel appeals on murder case timing
on Jul 12, 2006 at 3:02 pm
With the Supreme Court’s Term now concluded, the blog resumes its continuing series of reports on interesting new appeals to the Court. At this stage, the blog takes no position on whether the Court is likely to review those cases. These reports appear when the blog obtains an electronic copy of the filings.
A high-profile murder case from a fashionable neighborhood in Greenwich, Conn., involving a prosecution for a 1975 killing, reached the Supreme Court on Wednesday in an appeal by attorneys for Michael Skakel. The case is notorious in the news media because Skakel, now 45, is a cousin of the Kennedy family. The petition in Skakel v. Connecticut is available here. It is docketed as 06-52. For all of its trappings as a society murder prosecution, the case poses for the Court a basic constitutional issue over changing the deadlines for prosecution of long-ago crimes..
The petition raises a single issue: a claimed violation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment for the Connecticut Supreme Court’s authorization of a prosecution for a crime on which the charging deadline arguably had passed years before. Skakel was charged in 2000 with non-capital murder in the 1975 death of a neighbor girl, 15-year-old Martha Moxley of Greenwich. In 1975, Skakel was also 15 years old. He was convicted in 2002, and sentenced to a prison term of 20 years to life.
The appeal challenges a ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court last Jan.24. The 89-page opinion of the Court (docket SC 16844) can be found here. The nine-page concurring opinion can be found here
The petition argues: “This case presents a due process issue of exceptional importance implicating the right of every citizen to receive fair warning of when a prosecution may be brought. The Connecticut Supreme Court authorized a criminal prosecution of petitioner that the passage of time had previously barred. It did so by applying to his case a state statute that eliminates limitations periods for certain offenses, after having ruled twice in the previous 23 years that the statute does not apply to offenses, such as the one here, that pre-dated its enactment.”
The state has 30 days from Wednesday to file its response.
Skakel’s position says that at the time of the crime in 1975, prosecutors had five years to pursue a case of non-capital murder. One year later, the state legislature passed a law to lift any deadlines for crimes that included non-capital murder. Citing state Supreme Court rulings in 1983 (in State v. Paradise) and in 1994 (in State v. Crowell), the petition says those were binding rulings on the issue, and should have led to the dismissal of the charges against Skakel; for him, the petition contends, the time for filing a charge ran out in 1980.
The trial judge refused to dismiss the charge, concluding that the state had never had a deadline for pursuing a non-capital murder charge.
After Skakel’s conviction and appeal to the state Supreme Court, that tribunal ruled (among other findings) that its decision in the Paradise case had been wrong, and concluded that the legislature in 1976 had meant to lift the deadline for pursuing charges in any case in which the prior limitation period had not yet expired; the 1976 law, it said, was not prospective only in its application. “We are unwilling to compound the error that we made in Paradise by approving it again today,” it said.
Overruling the Paradise decision, as the state had suggested in response to Skakel’s challenge, the state court said “in view of the fact that the five year limitation period of the pre0-1976 amendment…had not expired with respect to the October, 1975 murder of the victim when the 196 amendments to that statutory provision became effective, we conclude that [the 1976 statute] is the operative statute of limitations for purposes of this case. Because, under [that statute], there is no time period within which murder and other class A felonies must be prosecuted, the trial court properly denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the information.”
The state court found that a law changing the statute of limitations for prosecution of a criminal offense was not penal in nature, so such a change does not deprive the public of fair notice of what the law forbids.
Skakel’s lawyers sought rehearing, arguing that the ruling violated his rights under the federal Constitution’s due process and ex post facto clauses. The state court denied that motion without comment.
Although the state court’s ruling on the merits was based upon its interpretation of state law, Skakel’s appeal to the Supreme Court argues that a federal constitutional issue is at stake because the ruling had retroactively expanded a limitations period after a prior such prior had run out. The petition relies upon the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2003 in Stogner v. California, barring the states from authorizing criminal prosecutions on which charging deadlines had passed.
“Applying the new interpretation to petitioner is manifestly unjust and oppressive, and it unfairly and dishonestly allows prosecution after petitioner has been assured (and reassured) that he was safe from pursuit,” the petition says.
