At issue is whether a key interview -- in which she referred to "antifree" -- should have been allowed as evidence.
View full sizeDid police violate Stacey Castor's right to counsel when they interviewed her in 2007?Syracuse, NY – The question of whether a key police interview with convicted husband killer Stacey Castor should have been suppressed is now before Onondaga County Court Judge Joseph Fahey.
Appellate attorney Randi Bianco and Chief Assistant District Attorneys James Maxwell and Christine Garvey presented arguments in court this morning surrounding the question of whether detectives violated Castor’s right to have an attorney present during a Sept. 7, 2007 interview.
Fahey set a control date of July 22 to check in with the attorneys, but said he was making no promises to render a decision by then.
Bianco said she is seeking to have a court vacate Castor’s 2009 conviction on charges that she murdered her husband, David, with antifreeze in August 2005 and tried to murder her daughter, Ashley Wallace, with alcohol and drugs in September 2007 to blame her for David’s death. Castor is serving a 51 1/3-year state prison sentence.
The Sept. 7 interview proved pivotal to the prosecution. Detective Dominick Spinelli testified during the trial that Castor made reference to “antifree,” a mispronunciation that prosecutors said proved that Castor also wrote a would-be suicide note to try to blame Wallace. The note included the same “antifree” reference.
Castor’s “indelible right” to counsel began in 2005, two years before the interview, when lawyer Norman Chirco advised her to cooperate with detectives who sought her fingerprints as they investigated David Castor’s death, Bianco said.
Chirco had been hired to help Stacey Castor with estate matters and never stated to detectives that he was representing her as they looked into David Castor’s death, Maxwell told Fahey.
"It is up to the defendant to show unequivocal entry of counsel," Maxwell said.
If Castor’s right to counsel was violated, the issue should have been raised during trial, he said.
Castor’s trial lawyer has testified that he erred when he failed to do that, amounting to ineffective assistance of counsel, Bianco said.
It didn’t matter why Castor hired Chirco, she said; what mattered is that he had given her advice on the investigation. Detectives knew it because Chirco told them in 2005 that he had advised her to cooperate, she said.
Maxwell, in turn, emphasized that Chirco had told authorities that Castor would cooperate fully.
Even if the interview was ruled unusable at trial, prosecutors would have raised the same questions when Castor took the witness stand, he said.