SJC may replace law that wiped Hernandez record
The state’s highest court is considering replacing the “pernicious” abatement ab initio common law that abolishes a jury’s guilty verdicts when a defendant dies with their case under appeal with Alabama’s common-sense practice of simply letting the record reflect the facts. In Alabama, Justice Scott L. Kafker explained, the verdicts are preserved, and one’s presumption of innocence is lost, but the case docket is updated to note that the defendant’s conviction was not finalized by an appellate decision because he or she died during the process. “It’s just an accurate statement of reality,” Kafker said. The Cotton State’s rule is based on the case of deathrow inmate Donald Ray Wheat, who died of illness in 2004 while appealing his convictions for the killings of a convenience store clerk in Georgia and four people inside a Blockbuster video store in Alabama. “The right to a jury trial is a pillar of our community. To just eliminate that verdict can be pernicious,” Supreme Judicial Court Justice David A. Lowy said yesterday during an impassioned debate over whether abatement ab initio too heavily favors murderers, child molesters and hoodlums at the expense of their victims and society. As currently applied, abatement ab initio “wipes everything out. That’s not fair, that’s not just. There’s a significant interest from our judicial system of maintaining the integrity of our jury verdicts, absent an error,” Bristol District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn argued before the full bench. The issue was raised anew last year when former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, 27, hung himself in prison while serving a life sentence. Because Hernandez was appealing his conviction for the 2013 murder of his friend Odin L. Lloyd in North Attleboro, abatement ab initio wiped his record clean as though his arrest and threemonth trial never happened. Attorney John Thompson, who said he was representing “the spirit of Aaron Hernandez,” wants abatement ab initio to remain as is. “The jury’s decision is not the end-all and be-all,” Thompson argued. “It is an opinion arrived at by 12 people that is subject to defect.”