Posts tagged "Drew Peterson"

Drew Peterson seeking new murder trial

A hearing is set to resume that will determine if former suburban Chicago police officer Drew Peterson gets a new trial on charges he murdered his third wife.

Peterson’s lawyers are asking for a retrial on grounds that his lead attorney at the 2012 trial failed to adequately defend him.

Will County Judge Edward Burmila heard a full day of testimony Tuesday before recessing without a ruling. The hearing resumes Wednesday.

Lead state prosecutor James Glasgow told reporters Tuesday he expects a ruling Wednesday.

The judge has said he’ll proceed straight to sentencing if he rejects the defense request for a retrial.

The 59-year-old Peterson faces a maximum 60-year prison term for Kathleen Savio’s death.

He’s also a suspect in the 2007 disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson.

Peterson case returns with hearing for new trial

A spat between Drew Peterson’s former lead trial attorney and current lawyers will appear in court.

A judge will hear arguments Tuesday that Peterson deserves a new trial on grounds that former lead trial attorney Joel Brodsky botched last year’s trial. Brodsky left the defense team in November and denies the allegations.

In September, jurors convicted Peterson — a former suburban Chicago police officer — of murdering his third wife. He also is a suspect in the 2007 disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson.

A Chicago-area defense attorney says it is unlikely Peterson will get a new trial.

If the motion is rejected, the judge could proceed straight to sentencing. Peterson faces a maximum 60-year prison term.

Murder trial tainted by media spectacle next door?

An Illinois man convicted of killing his wife and three children is asking for a new trial, but not solely because of what happened in his courtroom.

He’s blaming the high-profile trial next door.

Prosecutors say Christopher Vaughn fatally shot his family so he could start a new life in the Canadian wilderness. His September trial overlapped with the trial of Drew Peterson, the former suburban Chicago police officer charged with killing his third wife after his fourth wife disappeared.

Vaughn’s attorney, George Lenard, says Peterson’s lawyers made comments during press conferences that damaged the credibility of defense attorneys, including himself.

Prosecutors note that Lenard never asked that Vaughn’s trial be delayed because of Peterson’s trial.

A Will County judge will decide Tuesday whether to grant Vaughn a new trial.

Judge mulls new trial for dad in family slayings

A judge is considering granting a new trial to a 37-year-old suburban Chicago man convicted of murdering his wife and three children.

Judge Daniel Rozak said Monday that he will decide Tuesday whether Christopher Vaughn deserves a new trial or whether to proceed with sentencing Vaughn for his existing murder convictions. He faces a mandatory life term if his convictions stand.

Vaughn’s attorney, George Lenard, told the judge Monday that his client deserves a new trial, in part because of the Drew Peterson trial.

Lenard says the behavior of Peterson’s attorneys in front of the cameras made jurors think less of all defense attorneys, including Vaughn’s. The trials coincided and were both held in Joliet.

Vaughn was convicted in September of murdering his wife and three children in 2007.

Jurors set to begin deliberations at Drew Peterson trial

Now, it’s jurors’ turn.

After years of speculation, national media attention and more than a month of testimony, allegations that Drew Peterson murdered his third wife are finally expected to go to a jury Wednesday.

The 12 jurors — seven men and five women — are scheduled to receive instructions from the judge in the morning, then withdraw to a Joliet courthouse room to begin deliberating over five weeks of circumstantial and hearsay evidence.

Peterson, 58, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Kathleen Savio’s 2004 death. The former Bolingbrook police sergeant fell under scrutiny in Savio’s death only after his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared in 2007.

Peterson’s attorneys said their client has braced himself for jurors’ decision.

“He’s emotionally and mentally prepared for whatever happens,” his lead attorney, Joel Brodsy, told reporters after closing arguments Tuesday.

His lawyers also said they have no inkling what jurors might be thinking or how they might be leaning.

“Of course, we’re worried,” Joe Lopez, who delivered the closing for the defense, said about the final verdict. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

Judge Edward Burmila sent jurors home late Tuesday after closings dragged on longer than expected. He reminded jurors not to watch or read anything about the case and told them to get a good night’s sleep.

They might need it in a challenging case where there is no physical evidence and where — for the first time in Illinois history — a trial relies heavily on hearsay evidence.

During closing arguments Tuesday, prosecutors implored jurors to use common sense in assessing the evidence, while the defense said the state fell far short of proving Peterson killed his third wife.

Prosecutor Chris Koch began his remarks by walking up to the defense table, pointing at the 58-year-old Peterson and declaring in a booming voice, “It is clear this man killed Kathleen Savio.”

Savio’s body was found in her bathtub — her hair soaked with blood and a gash on the back of her head. Prosecutors contend Peterson killed the 40-year-old aspiring nurse because he feared a pending divorce settlement would wipe him out financially. The defense contends she died in an accidental slip and fall.

As he spoke, Koch displayed a photograph of a smiling Savio, juxtaposing it with another picture of her bloated corpse jammed into her bathtub.

As he has during most of the six-week trial, Peterson looked on calmly from the defense table, occasionally taking notes or whispering something to his attorneys.

Peterson is suspected but hasn’t been charged in Stacy Peterson’s disappearance. Prosecutors were barred from mentioning or hinting that she is presumed dead and that her husband is the lone suspect in her disappearance. While outside observers connect Savio’s death and Stacy Peterson’s disappearance, jurors aren’t supposed to factor that Stacy Peterson vanished into their deliberations.

Punching his fist into his palm for emphasis, Koch told jurors Thursday that Drew Peterson broke into his estranged wife’s home — just a few blocks from Drew and Stacy Peterson’s house in Bolingbrook — in the early morning hours before March 1, 2004.

“He went into that house, pushed her down, held her down until she inhaled fluid and drowned,” said Koch.

Investigators botched the initial investigation into Savio’s death and collected no fingerprints, blood, hair samples or any other physical evidence, leaving prosecutors with a circumstantial case.

Koch went through more than a dozen hearsay statements Savio allegedly made to others before she died and that Stacy Peterson made before she disappeared. Hearsay, or statements not based on the direct knowledge of a witness, isn’t usually admissible in court, but Illinois passed a law in 2008, dubbed “Drew’s Law,” that allows it in rare circumstances.

Koch reminded jurors that one witness testified how Savio had described Drew Peterson saying to her, “I’m going to kill you.” Another witness said Peterson told Savio he could employ his police expertise to kill her and make it look like an accident.

Defense attorney Lopez countered in his two-hour closing that the state had presented “garbage evidence” during its five-week presentation of more than 30 witnesses.

“The framers of the Constitution would barf on this evidence,” he said.

He said the hearsay was no more credible than water-cooler gossip they might hear around the office.

“How many times are you at work and you hear someone say something about someone — they’re lying!” he said.

Lopez told jurors that when they deliberate, they should hear a voice whispering that Peterson is innocent. Pointing to an American flag by at the judge’s bench, he said that presumption was the bedrock of the U.S. justice system.

“You have to find he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — not maybe, not probably,” he said.

Lopez frequently doubled back to his central argument: The state hadn’t even proven Savio’s death was a murder. He conceded statistics indicate fatal slips in bathtubs are one in a million, but that all the evidence suggests that’s just what happened to Savio.

“Are you trying to tell me no one has ever slipped in a bathtub before?” he asked. “That’s why they sell rubber mats with suction cups on them.”

But Koch told jurors it would be impossible for Savio to have received the wound on the back of her head and 14 bruises on the front of her body unless someone had attacked her.

“How can you get (all those wounds) in one fall?” he asked. “You can’t.”

If convicted, Peterson faces a maximum 60-year prison sentence.

Pathologist testifies Peterson’s third wife died after struggle

A forensics pathologist has testified at Drew Peterson’s murder trial that he believes the former Illinois police officer’s third wife died after a struggle with an attacker.

Dr. Michael Baden was the state’s first rebuttal witness Thursday as they sought to prove the 58-year-old Peterson killed his third wife, Kathleen Savio.

Pathologists for the defense have testified that Savio’s injuries were caused by an accidental fall.

Baden is the former chief medical examiner for New York City. He told jurors that Savio’s injuries indicated she was engaged in a struggle before she died.

Peterson has pleaded not guilty to murdering Savio. He was charged after his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared in 2007.

The defense has accused Baden of tailoring his findings for a network TV show he worked for.

Drew Peterson offered $25K to kill his third wife, witness says

A witness at Drew Peterson’s murder trial says the former Illinois police officer offered him $25,000 to hire someone to kill his third wife and told him it was a secret he’d take to his grave.

Jeff Pachter used to work with Peterson at a cable company. Pachter testified Wednesday that Peterson made the request months before Kathleen Savio was found dead in 2004. He says the code word to let Peterson know the hit happened was related to cookies, but he couldn’t remember the word.

During cross-examination, defense attorney Joe Lopez accused Pachter of inventing the story to get his 15 minutes of fame and profit from the case’s notoriety.

Prosecutors allege Peterson ended up killing Savio himself. He was charged only after his fourth wife disappeared in 2007.

Prosecutors’ blunders in Drew Peterson murder case underscore tricky trial based on hearsay

With no physical evidence tying Drew Peterson to the death of his third wife and so much of the case hinging on what she said before she died and what his next wife said before she vanished, it was a certainty that his trial would be unlike anything ever seen in Illinois and perhaps in the country.

But nobody expected what unfolded in the first three weeks of the trial: prosecutors made a series of blunders that prompted the judge to consider at least three defense motions for a mistrial and has some legal experts wondering just how much trust is left.

“If the jury can’t trust the prosecution, everything after that fails,” said Daniel Coyne, a professor at Chicago Kent School of Law and a former criminal defense lawyer, adding that it is not a big leap for jurors who don’t trust prosecutors not to trust the witnesses they call to testify. “The judge has told the jury on a number of occasions that the prosecutor has done something wrong … (If) they transfer that wrongness to the witnesses, that is very dangerous.”

It’s particularly important for prosecutors to connect with jurors in a trial such as Peterson’s, which relies heavily on what the former suburban Chicago police officer’s ex-wife, Kathleen Savio, told others before — as the prosecution alleges — he killed her and left her body in a bath tub in 2004.

Peterson also is a suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, though he has never been charged in that case and maintains she is still alive.

Prosecutors are trying to let jurors hear Savio’s voice “from the grave” to convince them not only that her death was a murder but that Peterson was capable of making it look like an accident, which authorities initially determined.

While Will County Judge Edward Burmila hasn’t declared a mistrial, he has harshly criticized prosecutors — sometimes in front of the jury — for saying things or asking questions that they shouldn’t have.

As the trial enters its fourth week, there is a growing speculation that the next big mistake might be the prosecution’s last and that Burmila could declare a mistrial and send the jurors home.

And even if that doesn’t happen, it’s unclear how much his public admonishment of prosecutors has hurt their credibility in the eyes of a jury deliberating whether Peterson, who has been locked up for three years during the investigation, should stay behind bars or go free.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Erickson, a former state appellate judge who teaches law at Chicago Kent College of Law, who has followed closely the trial.

On Friday, the judge barred testimony from a man who at a 2010 hearing said that Stacy Peterson had told him days before she vanished that her husband came in late the night the Savio died and said, “If anybody ever asks, I was home.”

The defense motioned for a mistrial each time prosecutors attempted to put before jurors testimony about Drew Peterson’s character or Savio’s fears of her ex-husband.

One came after Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow alleged minutes into the trial that before Peterson killed Savio he tried to hire a hit man to kill her. Another followed another prosecutor asking about Savio’s discussion about seeking an order of protection, about an hour after Burmila ordered that question not be asked. A third came after Savio’s neighbor testified that he viewed a bullet on his driveway as a message of intimidation from Peterson.

While Coyne, Erickson and others say what is going on would be dangerous to any prosecutors, it could be particularly so in Will County, where jurors are bound to be aware of several recent law enforcement blunders. That history includes the high-profile arrest of a man who spent eight months in jail in the 2004 slaying of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley Fox, before DNA evidence cleared him. Last year, another suburban police officer was wrongly jailed for random shootings along the Illinois-Indiana border that left one person dead.

“That could definitely be a factor,” said Kathleen Zellner, a defense attorney who won a multimillion-dollar court judgment on behalf of Riley Fox’s father, Kevin, and the child’s mother. “There’s a history there and jurors came (to the case) well informed.”

But others wonder if prosecutors are taking a deliberate risk by getting allegations about Peterson before the jury in the hopes that jurors will not disregard them, even if the judge orders them to.

“I think what they are doing is very calculated,” said Gal Pissetzky, a Chicago defense lawyer with no link to the case. “They are not young prosecutors who just got out of law school.”

The prosecution team includes Glasgow, a lawyer for more than 30 years, and Assistant State Attorney Kathleen Patton, a 19-year veteran of the office.

Prosecutors have apologized profusely for what they have characterized as inadvertent errors — particularly the question Patton asked about the order of protection. And Erickson doesn’t buy Pissetsky’s theory that prosecutors are purposely putting inadmissible allegations in jurors’ heads.

“I think the pressure’s gotten to them,” Erickson said, though he still predicts a conviction “unless this insanity goes on.”

Zellner said in her two days sitting in the courtroom, she became convinced prosecutors were winning the jury over. Jurors are intently taking notes when prosecutors question witnesses and “rolling their eyes” when Peterson’s attorneys object, she said.

Besides, she said, similar reports emerged about prosecutors in California during the trial of Scott Peterson before he was convicted in 2004 in the deaths of his wife, Laci, and the couple’s unborn son. Peterson, who is no relation to Drew Peterson, was sentenced to death.

“It was all an illusion that they weren’t winning,” Zellner said.

Toxicologist: No drugs, alcohol in Drew Peterson’s 3rd wife’s body

Prosecutors at Drew Peterson’s trial have begun addressing the central question of whether the former Illinois police officer’s third wife was actually murdered.

Forensic toxicologist Christopher Long was the first prosecution witness Tuesday. He told jurors about tests done on tissue samples from the body of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio.

Authorities initially ruled that Savio accidentally drowned in her bathtub. But after Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared in 2007, Savio’s body was re-examined and her death was reclassified as a homicide.

Long told jurors that tests conducted on Savio’s tissue in 2004 and 2007 found no sign of drugs or alcohol in her system.

The defense has said Savio died from an accidental fall and suggested she have may have been under the influence of some substance.

Toxicologist: No drugs, alcohol in body of Drew Peterson’s third wife

Prosecutors at Drew Peterson’s trial have begun addressing the central question of whether the former Illinois police officer’s third wife was actually murdered.

Forensic toxicologist Christopher Long was the first prosecution witness Tuesday. He told jurors about tests done on tissue samples from the body of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio.

Authorities initially ruled that Savio accidentally drowned in her bathtub. But after Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared in 2007, Savio’s body was reexamined and her death was reclassified as a homicide.

Long told jurors that tests on Savio’s tissue both in 2004 and 2007 found no sign of drugs or alcohol in her system.

The defense has said Savio died from an accidental fall and suggested she have may have been under the influence of some substance.