Opinion ID: 2273504
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 20

Heading: The Petitioner's Statements at Elan

Text: Most if not all of the evidence that was used to convict the petitioner consisted of statements that he allegedly had made at Elan and to Hoffman. According to the evidence adduced at the petitioner's criminal trial, Elan employed an extremely controversial behavior modification program that was based on confrontation, humiliation and public beatings. Of all the former Elan students who testified against the petitioner, however, only one, Gregory Coleman, claimed to have actually heard the petitioner confess to the victim's murder. Coleman contacted a television station in 1998, after watching a tabloid news show about Fuhrman's book and after a sizeable reward in the case had been advertised in People Magazine. Coleman, a twenty-five bag a day heroin addict, testified before the grand jury that had investigated the victim's murder and at the petitioner's probable cause hearing that he met the petitioner for the first time when he was assigned to guard him at Elan, following the petitioner's attempt to escape from the school. According to Coleman, the first thing that the petitioner ever said to him was, I am going to get away with murder; I am a Kennedy. . . . Coleman also stated that the petitioner had told him that he had beaten a girl's head in with a golf club and, two days later, had gone back to the body and masturbated on [it]. Coleman died of a heroin overdose before the petitioner's criminal trial, but his probable cause hearing testimony was admitted into evidence and read to the jury at that trial. [102] Part of the reward money that Coleman had sought ultimately was awarded to Coleman's estate. Other former Elan students who testified, however, told a very different story about the petitioner, insisting that the petitioner never confessed to the victim's murder. Rather, as they recalled, Joseph Ricci, the executive director of Elan, often taunted the petitioner about the victim's murder, accusing him either of having committed the crime or of knowing who did. At one point, after the petitioner had run away from the school, a general meeting [103] was convened at which the petitioner was brutalized for several hours in a boxing ring in front of the entire school. All of the witnesses gave similar accounts of the incident. Alice Dunn, a former student, testified at the petitioner's criminal trial that, for three days before the general meeting, the petitioner had been forced to stand in the corner of the school's dining room without any sleep. On the third day, he was placed against the wall, and at least 150 students confronted him by yelling and spitting in his face. After a while, the petitioner was placed in a boxing ring and questioned by Ricci about a variety of matters, including the victim's murder. According to Dunn, this was the first time that anyone at Elan ever had heard about the victim's murder. Ricci, who appeared to be reading from the petitioner's file, tried to get the petitioner to confess, but the petitioner insisted over and over that he didn't do it. Each time the petitioner denied involvement in the crime, Ricci put him in the boxing ring, and students would pummel him until he was physically . . . wiped out. . . . The objective of the general meeting was to make the petitioner feel abandoned by his family so that he would think that he had no alternative but to submit to the Elan program. According to Sarah Petersen, another former Elan student, the petitioner cried uncontrollably during the beatings. She said that Ricci often liked to pull [the petitioner] out [of the crowd at general meetings and] emotionally pound on him, saying things like, we know you did this. . . . When Ricci did not get the response that he was seeking, he would put the petitioner in the boxing ring or spank him with a paddle. Petersen testified that the petitioner always denied any involvement in the murder, but, after long hours of torture, he would say that he did not remember just to get them to lay off him for a little while. [104] Another former student, Michael Wiggins, remembered the general meetings as pure mayhem, with students hitting the petitioner as hard as they could while others screamed hit him, hit him hard, hit him harder. . . . Wiggins recalled that the petitioner always denied any involvement in the victim's murder until he was beaten down and extremely fatigued, at which point he would say, I don't remember. . . . The beatings would stop as soon as the petitioner expressed some doubt. Wiggins himself was beaten so severely at Elan that, twenty-five years later, he still had scars on his body from those beatings. According to Wiggins, the beatings would stop for everyone as soon as they told Ricci what Ricci wanted to hear, even if it was not true. Elizabeth Arnold, another former Elan student, testified that, two days after the petitioner's first boxing ring incident, Ricci tried to reassure the petitioner at a group therapy session that Ricci did not really think that the petitioner had killed the victim, only that the petitioner knew who did and that he probably was covering up for Tommy Skakel. The petitioner responded that he didn't know and didn't remember anything about the night of the victim's murder. [105] By all accounts, the petitioner's rumored involvement in the victim's murder became his identity at Elan. For weeks on end, he was forced to wear a sign around his neck that stated, I am a spoiled brat, please confront me on the murder of my friend, Martha Moxley. . . . Dunn testified that she approached the petitioner after the first general meeting and asked him about the victim's murder. She thought that, if she talked to him, it might jar his memory, and that she might be the one who would be able to get him to make some sort of confession. . . . He responded that he just didn't know, that he had been drinking that night and that he was not in his normal state of mind. Nine months later, after the petitioner had graduated from Elan and both he and Dunn became staff members there, they had dinner at a local restaurant, and she asked him again if he really ha[d] no memory of what [had] happened. . . . When the trial court presiding over the petitioner's criminal trial asked Dunn to recall exactly how she had put the question to him, she responded: To the best of my recollection, I put it to him like, you know, you know, what about that whole thing with your family and, you know, with the murder of that girl in Greenwich and, you know, do you, you know, you know, what do you think, you know, I mean, what do you think happened, really, back there. According to Dunn, the petitioner answered in the same way that he always had answered, that is, I don't know what happened, you know. I don't know if it was me. I don't know if it was my brother, you know. I don't know because I don't remember anything. I just don't know. John Higgins testified that, on one occasion, when he and the petitioner were on night owl duty at Elan, which consisted of guarding the dormitory door to ensure that none of the students escaped, the petitioner talked with him for hours. According to Higgins, the petitioner told him about a murder that he was somehow involved in and that he remembered that there was a party going on . . . at his house. He also remembered going through some golf clubs and running through some woods. According to Higgins, the petitioner was sobbing and crying, just releasing emotions and bleeding out. [T]hrough a progression of statements, he said that he didn't know whether he did it, that he may have done it, [that] he didn't know what happened, [and that] eventually, he came to the point that he [thought he] did do it, [that] he must have done it. . . . The import of Higgins' testimony is questionable, however, because, on cross-examination, he acknowledged that he had failed to tell the state's investigator about the petitioner's alleged admissions in the first few conversations that Higgins had had with the investigator. Higgins also claimed that approximately twenty-five to thirty people were with him and the petitioner when the petitioner made his admissions, but none of these alleged witnesses testified at trial. Higgins claimed, moreover, that his conversation with the petitioner was the first and only time that he ever had heard about the victim's murder, and that he later read about it in People Magazine in the 1990s. Every other Elan witness, however, testified that the murder was a regular topic of conversation at general meetings, which were mandatory for all the students to attend. Indeed, one witness, Petersen, testified at the petitioner's criminal trial that Higgins had been the petitioner's personal overseer for at least six weeks after the petitioner attempted to run away. [106] Finally, Higgins admitted that he was aware of the reward money when he came forward and that Garr had advised Higgins that the reward had been increased to $100,000. [107] These statements at Elan constitute the state's strongest evidence of the petitioner's guilt. A careful review of the statements, however, reveals that, although they may have been sufficient to sustain a conviction, they reasonably cannot be characterized as particularly powerful or convincing because the exclusive source of the single, unequivocal admission attributed to the petitioner was the probable cause hearing testimony of Coleman, who, for reasons that I previously have explained, was among the least credible of the witnesses that the state produced. Indeed, it is not unfair to say that it would be difficult to find a witness more lacking in credibility. [108] The other statements that the petitioner made to Elan students none of whom came forward until many years after the alleged statements were madeall were equivocal and very well could have been the product of an emotionally troubled adolescent who had been hounded about the matter during his entire tenure at Elan. During closing argument, the state's attorney argued forcefully that the petitioner's statements at Elan constituted powerful evidence of consciousness of guilt. The state's attorney maintained, moreover, that the only way that Ricci would have known about the victim's murder is if the petitioner's family had told him about it when they enrolled him at Elan. The state's attorney also argued that the only explanation for the petitioner's presence at Elan was that his family must have sent him there because they thought that he was guilty of the victim's murder and, further, that sending the petitioner to Elan would assist in the cover-up of the petitioner's guilt. Specifically, the state's attorney asserted: One thing every client of Elan who was there during that particular era recalls vividly is . . . Ricci referring to a file and telling the [petitioner] that he wasn't getting out of [the boxing] ring until he explained why he killed [the victim], and then being forced to wear a sign [that says]: `Confront me on the murder of my neighbor.' Where did Ricci get that information? Clearly, he didn't get it from the police. [109] Why did Ricci have that information? Why did Ricci confront the [petitioner] with that information? The answer, the only one that makes sense, lies in why the [petitioner] was there in the first place, lies in why his family felt a need to put him in that awful place. Why? Because that's what they decided that they had to do with the killer living under their roof. [110] The state's attorney also maintained: One thing that I submit helps tie all this together, particularly on the subject of Elan. . . is the [petitioner's] very presence at that place. The defense scoffs at the idea despite . . . such clear evidence of a coverup. Why was the [petitioner] at Elan? This is really not a matter of seeing the forest from the trees. It is genuinely transparent. Clearly, the [petitioner] had a major problem. Already he was an alcoholic, a substance abuser. Already he was beyond the control of his family. He was becoming suicidal. I doubt his family was even aware of the sexual turmoil he was going through. Elan was a last resort but why exactly so drastic a resort. Although the state's attorney's argument was sufficiently rooted in the evidence to defeat a claim of prosecutorial impropriety; see State v. Skakel, supra, 276 Conn. at 755-59, 888 A.2d 985; the theorya centerpiece of the state's case against the petitionerverged on the speculative. Because it called for an inference that was so attenuated from the factsnamely, that the petitioner's father had sent him to Elan because he thought that the petitioner had killed the victim the theory falls well short of convincing. Indeed, in my view, the relative weakness of the state's case is reflected in this very argument by the state's attorney, which requires the fact finder to reject other equally plausible scenarios without any convincing reason to do so. [111] The defense, evidently unimpressed with the strength of the state's case, offered no real rebuttal to the state's attorney's argument that only someone who had committed murder would say some of the things that the petitioner had said at Elan, or that the petitioner must have been sent to Elan because his family believed that he was responsible for the victim's murder. The defense also offered no explanation as to how an innocent person, particularly one as emotionally troubled as the petitioner, could convince himself that he may have killed someone in a drunken stupor but had no recollection of doing so. Indeed, during closing argument, defense counsel boasted to the jury that, because of the weakness of the state's case, he had not deemed it necessary to call a single expert witness to provide an alternative explanation for the petitioner's statements. The nature of our defensewe didn't have the high tech delivery. . . . You don't see the big fancy jury expert sitting at our table. It's somewhat low key. It is me and three kids, as you can see. . . . We didn't bring in one expert. There is no memory expert. There is no this expert, there is no dog expert, nothing. We didn't give you any fancy theories. We didn't give you a twinkie defense. Defense counsel noted, however, that the petitioner was not the only suspect in the case who had made incriminating statements over the years and that Littleton, like the petitioner, had expressed doubt on several occasions as to whether he, too, could have committed the crime. Indeed, it is remarkable that at least three people have, to varying degrees, made self-incriminatory statements with respect to the victim's murder, namely, Littleton, Bryant and the petitioner. Significantly, of the three, only Bryant has no known history of emotional disturbance, addiction or acting out. In fact, it is precisely because Bryant is so much more credible than practically every other witness in the case that I am persuaded that, if a jury were to consider his statements together with the original evidence, it likely would find the petitioner not guilty of the victim's murder.