Judge dismisses jurors for Dabate murder trial
Lengthy delay caused by pandemic cited
The long-delayed murder trial against Richard Dabate will have to wait even longer after the entire jury asked to hear the case was dismissed Tuesday, almost 16 months after the group was seated for the highly anticipated trial that already has been years in the making.
The long-delayed murder trial against Richard Dabate will have to wait even longer after the entire jury asked to hear the case was dismissed Tuesday, almost 16 months after the group was seated for the highly anticipated trial that already has been years in the making.
Jury selection was nearly complete in the second week of March 2020, the exact same time the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Connecticut prompted the entire state to effectively shut down, including the deferral of many in-person court hearings and jury trials.
The case and those jurors have hung in limbo ever since, and although in-person jury 0trials are resuming in some cases across the state, Judge Julia D. Dewey decided Tuesday it has simply been too long since the jury was seated to continue with that group. Some of the selected jurors have moved in the intervening months, even out of state in some instances, she added.
The decision was not completely unexpected, but it will force prosecutors and a new configuration of Dabate’s defense team to restart the jury selection process as soon as sometime this fall.
Dabate, who is free on bail and appeared in court Tuesday afternoon in a dark suit, is accused of staging a home invasion after
fatally shooting his wife, 39-year-old Connie Dabate, in December 2015 at their Ellington home.
Police were skeptical of Dabate’s claim and launched a comprehensive investigation that included obtaining data from Connie Dabate’s Fitbit, posts to social media and data from their home’s alarm system. Police ultimately charged Dabate in April 2017 with murder, tampering with evidence and lying to police and the use of Fitbit’s technology in their case drew international attention.
Legendary defense attorney Hubert J. Santos and his partner Trent Lalima took Dabate’s case and Santos presciently argued during jury selection early last year that the new contagious virus infecting people on the West Coast and in New York City eventually would impact Connecticut’s trial courts. Most in-person court proceedings, including jury trials, were halted less than two weeks later and Dabate’s case has been on hold ever since.
The state judicial branch allowed jury trials to resume in June, on the back of increasing vaccination numbers and
before the new Delta variant began to spread widely, but the Dabate case did not proceed immediately.
Then on June 21, Santos died unexpectedly at 76 years old after a brief hospitalization, sending shockwaves throughout the state’s legal community.
Lalima said Tuesday he will continue to defend Dabate and will be lead counsel at the eventual trial, however, he is still looking for a new second attorney to help with the trial as Santos had planned to before his death.
“That continues to be the plan for me to be lead counsel, but I will need some time to find another counselor to be second chair,” Lalima said. “So I will continue to be the lead counsel but we will be having someone else with me at the trial.”
The case is scheduled to return to court on Oct. 5 before Judge Kathleen Mcnamara and Dewey asked Lalima to try to have more details about the schedule for bringing on a second attorney at that time because scheduling the next steps for the case will depend heavily on when that other attorney joins.
“There’s an awful lot to be done,” she said.