Case involving killing of Stamford cab driver reaches state’s top court
HARTFORD — A Stamford man’s argument that he acted in self-defense while fatally stabbing a taxi driver in 2014 reached the Connecticut Supreme Court on Monday, where his attorney argued that his murder conviction should be overturned.
Norm Pattis, representing the convicted murderer Shota Mekoshvili, argued that model jury instructions for Connecticut’s “notoriously difficult” self-defense laws are erroneously worded and give prosecutors an improper advantage against defendants who claim to have acted in self-defense.
Mekoshvili was convicted of murder in 2017 in what prosecutors described as a crime of “viciousness” and “brutality” that left the victim, Mohamad Kamal, unrecognizable with 127 knife wounds. While police attributed the crime to a robbery, Mekoshvili claimed selfdefense, saying he fought off Kamal after rebuffing his sexual advances.
Jurors rejected that argument, and Mekoshvili was sentenced to 60 years in prison. The Connecticut Appellate Court upheld the ruling on appeal last year, prompting a further appeal to the Supreme Court.
On Monday, Pattis said the trial judge in the case erred by refusing to instruct jurors that in order to convict Mekoshvili, they would have to unanimously agree on a rationale for rejecting his self-defense claims. Instead, Judge John F. Blawie gave standard jury instructions, which misled the jurors, Pattis said.
While some of the justices expressed sympathy with Pattis over the wordy nature of jury instructions surrounding self-defense, many appeared skeptical that additional clarification over unanimity should be required.
“I think we can all agree that the self-defense instructions are confusing in general,” said Justice Maria Araujo Kahn, before pointing out that attorneys for the state argued that no other states required the type of instruction that Pattis sought in this case.
To successfully claim self-defense in Connecticut, defendants must show that they believed they were under a threat of physical harm and the use of force was necessary. They must also show that both beliefs are reasonable. Prosecutors can rebut any one of those elements to argue that self-defense was not justified.
Pattis, who also represented Mekoshvili at trial, argued that jurors cannot “mix and match” which elements of a defendant’s self-defense claim they find unbelievable.
For example, he argued, it would be “fundamentally unfair” if some jurors found that a defendant faced real danger, but acted with unreasonable force to protect themselves, while others on the jury simply concluded that there was never a threat of danger in the first place.
He noted that prosecutors are otherwise required to unanimously convince jurors on each element of the underlying crime — such as murder — in order to reach a guilty verdict.
“It is nonetheless the state’s burden to disprove self-defense,” Pattis said. “Why should the state get the benefit of splitting that vote among those four columns?”
Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Ron Weller, however, argued that no precedent existed for placing such a burden on prosecutors, which he said would result in losing “valid convictions.”
Even if the justices on the Supreme Court agree that juries should be instructed to unanimously agree on a rationale for rejecting self-defense, he asked the court to keep in place Mekoshvili’s conviction, repeatedly referring to the number of stab wounds inflicted upon the victim.
“This was not a case where the jury was really hung up on which element of self-defense the state disproved,” Weller said.
Following the hearing on Monday, Pattis said the jury’s lengthy deliberations at Mekoshvili’s 2017 trial indicated that they took a more considered approach to the defense’s arguments.
“The state makes it sound as though this was a case that any idiot could have decided in a heartbeat,” Pattis said. “They labored over it for three days.”