STAMFORD, Conn. - After spending more than a decade behind bars for the murder of a teenage girl in Greenwich, Conn., Michael Skakel, a cousin of the Kennedys, was ordered freed from prison Thursday.
Judge Gary White of Stamford Superior Court set bail at $1.2 million, ordering Skakel not to leave the state and to wear a tracking device so his movements can be monitored.
As the judge made his announcement, friends and relatives of Skakel burst out in applause. Skakel, dressed in a suit and blue tie, tapped his chest as he walked out of the courtroom, his family trailing behind.
Shortly after 2 p.m., Skakel emerged from the basement of the courthouse, embracing supporters in enthusiastic bear hugs.
He stood silently while his lawyer spoke to the throng of reporters outside before being whisked away in a waiting car.
It was the latest twist in a case that has fascinated the public and confounded investigators since 1975, when the battered body of a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was found beneath a tree in her family’s backyard, pieces of a broken 6-iron golf club by her side.
Skakel, now 53, was also 15 at the time, and the two were neighbors in a town that has long been a bastion of wealth and privilege. At different times, both Skakel and his brother, Thomas, were suspected of killing Moxley. But it was a quarter of a century before Michael Skakel was tried and convicted. In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
The bail hearing came after Judge Thomas Bishop of Superior Court in Rockville ruled last month that Skakel did not receive a fair trial because his first lawyer, Mickey Sherman, had not represented him effectively, thereby depriving him of his constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel.
In a scathing 136-page ruling, Bishop wrote that Sherman failed to show an attention to detail, lacked a coherent strategy and “was in a myriad of ways ineffective.” Those failures, he wrote, led to a “conviction that lacks reliability.”
After the ruling, Skakel’s current lawyer, Hubert Santos, filed a motion for his client to be released on bail. In a later hearing, Bishop decided that the question of whether to grant bail belonged with the criminal court in Stamford, where Skakel will be retried if the state decides to go forward with another prosecution.
Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the link to one of America’s most famous families fueled interest in the case.
Skakel’s trial in 2002 lasted three weeks and revealed tawdry details about his life as a young man, including his drinking and drug use. In his defense, Skakel acknowledged that on the night of the murder, he had climbed a tree and masturbated while trying to look into Moxley’s bedroom.
During the trial, the prosecution painted Skakel as an emotionally disturbed young man who was consumed with guilt after the killing, prompting confessions and suicide attempts. In one particularly vivid example cited in court documents, a man employed by the family as a gardener described how Skakel once tried to jump off the Triborough Bridge after saying that “he had done something very bad, and that he needed to get out of the country, and that he had to kill himself.”
Skakel has always publicly maintained his innocence.
Throughout the trials and appeals, Skakel’s family has fought fiercely on his behalf, spending millions of dollars in various bids to win his freedom.
At a news conference outside the courthouse Thursday, Moxley’s mother, Dorthy, and brother, John, expressed disappointment at the decision but confidence that Bishop’s decision to overturn the conviction would be reversed by the state’s appeal.
“We knew this day would come, so I wasn’t completely destroyed,” said Dorthy Moxley. She also remarked upon the seemingly endless situation: “There’s a lesson to parents: If your child does something wrong, face up to it.”
Santos used the bail hearing to once again criticize the original prosecution of Skakel. He said the state’s case was weak and based largely on hearsay.
“If the prosecution found a homeless guy at a train station” who claimed that Skakel confessed to the murder, Santos said, “he would be on the stand in a New York minute.”
John Smirga, the lawyer for the state, defended the handling of the case but also noted the difficulties of prosecuting a crime so long after it took place.
“Each time the facts of this case are presented, they mutate,” he said. There was no single piece of evidence - like DNA, an eyewitness or a photograph - that could be used against the defendant, he said.
He compared the case to “a giant jigsaw puzzle,” but one without a picture to show what it is supposed to look like when all the pieces are put together. Smirga said he was confident the state solved the puzzle and vowed to continue in its appeal of Bishop’s decision to vacate the conviction.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 11/22/2013