Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Prosecutors rest case vs. Dippolito
Jury sees video in murder-for-hire retrial
Jurors in Dalia Dippolito’s retrial on Thursday watched a 2009 police video of her saying she was “5,000 percent sure” about arranging the shooting death of her newlywed husband.
Prosecutors also rested their murder-for-hire case on what was the trial’s second day.
The jury spent the day hearing testimony from two main figures in the high-profile case: an undercover cop who posed as a hit man; and Dippolito’s ex-lover who called Boynton Beach police with concerns about Dippolito and became a confidential informant.
Mohamed Shihadeh — the informant who was a prosecution witness appearing on a video recording in Dippolito’s first trial in 2011 — was the first witness called by the defense on Thursday for Round Two.
Live in court this time, he appeared uncomfortable during more than two hours on the stand, with his eyes darting around the courtroom and clasping his hands together and rubbing his face.
Wearing a white T-shirt with a print design, Shihadeh offered conflicting accounts of whether he thought Dippolito was serious about using a hit man, and he referred to her by the name “Delilah.”
But there also was a troubling moment that briefly brought the trial to a halt. When defense attorney Brian Claypool asked if Shihadeh knew whether his phone calls with Dippolito were recorded, he said he found out during her “first trial” from the “first prosecutor.”
Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley immediately conferred with the lawyers because the jury wasn’t supposed to find out Dippolito stood trial before. One of the reasons jury selection took four days was to find jurors who had no knowledge of Dippolito’s muchpublicized case.
“At no time should you ever make reference to a first trial,” Kelley instructed Shihadeh, with the jury out of the room.
Dippolito, 34, previously was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But two years ago, a state appellate court ruled Dippolito did not get a fair trial because the jury pool was tainted by hearing an allegation she once tried to poison her husband.