Syracuse, NY - The judge who presided over Stacey Castor’s 2009 murder trial and sentenced her to serve 51 1/3 years to life in state prison has rejected a defense request to set aside the conviction and conduct a new trial. In a four-page decision released this afternoon, Onondaga County Court Judge Joseph Fahey rejected lawyer Randi Bianco’s contention...
View full sizeStacey Castor lost her bid Monday for a new trial.Syracuse, NY - The judge who presided over Stacey Castor’s 2009 murder trial and sentenced her to serve 51 1/3 years to life in state prison has rejected a defense request to set aside the conviction and conduct a new trial.
In a four-page decision released this afternoon, Onondaga County Court Judge Joseph Fahey rejected lawyer Randi Bianco’s contention that a key interview of Castor by Sheriff’s Detective Dominick Spinelli should have been suppressed because the interview violated Castor’s right to counsel.
The Sept. 7, 2007, interview was a critical part of the prosecution’s case in convicting Castor of murdering her husband by poisoning him with antifreeze in August 2005 and trying to murder her daughter in September 2007 in a plot to blame her for the murder.
Spinelli testified Castor made reference to “antifree” in the interview, a mispronunciation the prosecution claimed proved Castor also wrote a would-be suicide note - which contained the same “antifree” reference – in a bid to try and blame her daughter for the crime.
Bianco contended that Spinelli should not have been allowed to talk to Castor because authorities knew she was represented by lawyer Norman Chirco since detectives had talked to Chirco as Castor’s lawyer in 2005 in arranging to get fingerprints from Castor during the investigation of her husband’s death.
Fahey concluded that he was obligated to reject the defense request to set aside the verdict because there is sufficient evidence about the issue on the case record for an appellate court to review in an appeal of Castor’s conviction.
But Fahey went further in noting that he would also reject the defense request if he were to proceed to consider the merits of Bianco’s claim.
The judge noted Chirco was representing Castor in 2005 as a result of a dispute with her dead husband’s son over the estate and she never told authorities she had a lawyer representing her regarding the investigation into her husband’s death.
Chirco’s conduct in advising Castor to cooperate fully with regard to the fingerprint request was inconsistent with that of a lawyer representing a defendant in a criminal investigation, Fahey noted.
Chirco’s representation of Castor in the civil estate matter did not preclude detectives from questioning her in September 2007 as Bianco contends, Fahey concluded.
The judge also rejected Bianco’s contention that Castor was the victim of ineffective assistance of counsel because her trial lawyer, Charles Keller, failed to move to suppress the Spinelli interview as a violation of Castor’s right to counsel.
“Our constitution guarantees the accused a fair trial, not necessarily a perfect one and counsel’s effort should not be second-guessed with the clarity of hindsight,” Fahey noted.
The judge concluded Keller’s failure to challenge the Spinelli interview as a violation of Castor’s right to counsel did not amount to ineffective assistance of counsel because such a motion if it had been made by Keller would have had “little or no chance of success.”