HARTFORD, Conn. — In a long and biting decision, a state judge Wednesday set aside Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel’s murder conviction and ordered his retrial in the 1975 death of Greenwich teen 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-years-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 capably 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.
