Prosecutors: Suicide shouldn’t nix conviction
Hernandez estate at stake, as IRS looks to seize ex-Patriot’s home
Prosecutors who proved that Aaron Hernandez was a cold-blooded murderer will today argue that the former New England Patriot’s suicide should not nullify his homicide conviction — taking aim at an old law that is now under the microscope.
“In this circumstance, the underlying conviction, consistent with the law of the Commonwealth, should remain intact,” Bristol prosecutor Patrick Bomberg wrote in a filing last week.
Bomberg was on the team of prosecutors who in 2015 convinced a Bristol County jury that Hernandez killed his onetime friend, Odin L. Lloyd, in a North Attleboro industrial park during the summer of 2013. Now prosecutors are fighting against the legal doctrine of abatement ab initio — the idea that defendants who die before their appeals are exhausted should have their convictions nullified.
Hernandez, who killed himself in jail during the early morning hours of April 19, had not yet had his automatic appeal heard in the Lloyd case. Under the current state of the law, that means his conviction would be wiped clean.
But Bristol prosecutors argue it’s time for Massachusetts to refine the law so that it is fair to victims and doesn’t reward Hernandez’s actions.
“In this circumstance a balance must be struck between the policy interests advanced by abatement, the effect of the defendant’s actions in frustrating the interests of justice and the interests in maintaining the validity of the conviction,” Bomberg wrote.
The pitch to cement Hernandez’s conviction caused prosecutors to file several controversial documents with the court last week. In the stack was Hernandez’s suicide note to his fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez, in which he told her, “you’re rich.”
A Department of Correction document indicated Hernandez had heard a “rumor” that, “if an inmate has an open appeal on his case and dies in prison, he is acquitted of his charge and will be deemed not guilty.”
Prosecutors argue that if inmates are allowed to nullify a conviction through suicide — an action that could hurt civil cases against them — that defendant “has the reins of the entire justice system in his own hands.”
Meanwhile, along with the families of three slain men who filed wrongful death suits against Hernandez, the Internal Revenue Service also wants his house, and filed a lien against Hernandez and his $1.3 million mansion in North Attleboro in 2015 for more than $117,395 in unpaid federal income taxes for 2013. The tax lien was filed on April 16, 2015, a day after Hernandez was convicted of killing Lloyd.
Hernandez was acquitted in the 2012 fatal driveby shootings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado five days before he hanged himself at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster.
As part of their still-pending wrongful-death lawsuits against Hernandez, the families of Lloyd, de Abreu and Furtado all have writs of attachment on his house. Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez has reported in court papers that aside from the house, Hernandez’s estate is worth “$0.00.”