We learned that he was paid $1.2 million for the defense of Skakel, and that, despite that fee, he still managed not to pay his taxes, ending up disbarred briefly and in federal prison. The sites now turned on Sherman, the high-flying, aw-shucks, hug-me kind of guy with a disarming smile, a perpetual tan, and a pose for every camera. The defense filed a habeas corpus petition claiming that, in effect, Skakel had been deprived of his right to effective assistance of counsel at trial. Another appeal was filed, and this, too, ended in defeat for the Kennedy clan.īut when money is no object, the fight goes on. Bryant was found non-credible, and other supposed “newly discovered” evidence, the court concluded, was available to Sherman in the 2002 trial. This murder in paradise now had a racial element: A black man testified that a friend of his said he wanted to rape Moxley on the night she was found dead. Enter Gitano “Tony” Bryant, a cousin of Los Angeles Laker basketball star Kobe Bryant. The Skakel team offered what lawyers call “third-party culpability” evidence, a claim that some other dude did it.
#Icarus pose trial#
One way to get a new trial is persuade a judge that you have discovered new evidence you did not have, and could not have had, in the “exercise of due diligence” at the time of the original trial. New trial petitions are actually civil actions. But the trial court concluded that the evidence was not newly discovered, it had been there all along. wrote an article for The Atlantic suggesting a live-in tutor for the Skakel brood, Kenneth Littleton, had committed the crime. Then he petitioned for a new trial with new lawyers, claiming newly discovered evidence suggested that someone else had committed the crime. When would he crash? Or can men, too, be dumb, and charmed, bauble heads? It was not uncommon to hear lawyers say of him after the trial: “I could have screwed that case up for half the price.” Mickey was Icarus, flying too close to the Sun. Sherman didn’t fare as well among members of the state’s defense bar. Sherman lost the case, but not the confidence of television executives he became a paid talking-head for one network, he’d chortle on demand with the likes of Nancy Grace on another, he’d think nothing of hopping a flight to Los Angeles to attend star-studded events, or jumping in a limousine for dinner at Elaine’s, a Manhattan trough for the rich and famous. Skakel was represented at that trial by Mickey Sherman, who was rumored to have been paid millions of dollars for the defense. He was convicted by a Stamford jury in 2002, in as high-profile a trial as any in Connecticut’s history. In 2000, Michael Skakel was charged with the crime. Perhaps, some wondered, he was the killer. Rumors swirled that he was seen at the Skakel house the night Moxley was murdered. Then another member of the Kennedy clan, William Kennedy Smith, was tried, and acquitted, in a celebrated Florida rape case in 1991. Thomas and Martha had been flirting, and kissing. On the night of October 30, 1975, the girl was last seen alive with another member of the Skakel clan, Thomas, brother of Michael. Like Skakel, she was a resident of the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, a land of milk and honey, where children run off to eat supper at the “clubs” to which their parents belong, signing tabs instead of doing dishes after a meal. Martha Moxley, then 15, was beaten and then stabbed to death with a golf club, the six iron shattering in the course of the attack, its shaft then used as a lancing weapon, a sort of cruel metaphor reflecting that even the leisure class is capable of murder.
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