Start of Tempest retrial delayed
WOONSOCKET – Originally scheduled to begin on Tuesday, the retrial of accused murderer Raymond D. “Beaver” Tempest Jr. is now expected to begin no sooner than Oct. 24, court officials say.
Craig Berke, spokesman for the judiciary, said Superior Court Judge Robert D. Krause granted a defense request for more time to perform DNA tests on a cigarette butt recovered from the crime scene nearly 36 years ago. Berke said the date has been set, but it’s possible the start of the trial could be pushed back again by a couple more weeks, if not longer.
The ruling was one of several handed down by Krause in a recent round of pre-trial jockeying by state prosecutors and Tempest’s lawyers from the New England Innocent Project.
Now 64, Tempest served 23 years at the state prison before he was released on bail in September 2015 after another Superior Court judge vacated his conviction, concluding he did not receive a fair trial. Tempest had been sentenced to serve 85 years after a jury conviction for second-degree murder in the 1982 bludgeoning death of Bellingham prom queen Doreen C. Picard, who was 22 years old. The trial took place in 1992.
Tempest, who has always maintained his innocence, succeeded in persuading Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini to review his case over two years ago in a hearing for post-conviction relief. After lengthy testimony from Woonsocket police officers who investigated the case, outside experts on police procedure and others, Procaccini concluded that Tempest’s conviction was invalid because witnesses had been aggressively coached by police and the prosecutor who argued the 1992 trial unlawfully withheld certain evidence from defense lawyers.
The state appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed with Procaccini in a three-way split.
Three of the high court’s five members concurred with Procaccini on the issue of prosecutorial misconduct, a fourth saw other grounds for overturning the conviction, and a fifth – Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg – disagreed with all the others. She strenuously argued that the conviction should be left alone.
While the conviction was vacated, Procaccini stopped short of declaring Tempest innocent of the homicide, leaving intact the 1991 indictment charging him with the crime.
Despite the passage of so much time and the death of at least nine witnesses since the original trial – including some who testified that Tempest confessed to them that he had committed the murder – Attorney General Peter Kilmartin is moving toward seating a new jury to hear the case against Tempest a second time.
Last month, his lawyers argued that Tempest could never get a fair trial now, claiming their right to crossexamine witnesses has been unlawfully abridged as a result of their deaths. Krause denied the motion, however, saying jurors are fully capable of evaluating the credibility of those witnesses based on their prior statements under questioning by defense and state lawyers during the original trial.
Krause also granted a state motion to prevent the defense from calling former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis to testify on police procedure. The judge said jurors don’t need one police officer telling them whether or not Woonsocket police officers did their jobs of interrogating witnesses properly.
Picard’s body was found in the basement of 409 Providence St. on Feb. 19, 1982, near that of her landlady, who had been brutally beaten. Prosecutors argued Tempest murdered Picard to eliminate her as a witness to the attack on Susan Laferte and that his brother, Gordon Tempest, a detective on the Woonsocket police department, helped cover up his involvement by tampering with evidence.