Husband may testify in Dippolito retrial

Prosecutors could change strategy

When Dalia Dippolito goes on trial for the third time, she may find herself staring across the courtroom again at the man she is accused of trying to kill.

Michael Dippolito didn’t testify in the second trial, but he received a court notice last week to be available to testify in the upcoming retrial.

The attorneys in the case can’t discuss their strategy because the judge has placed a gag order on them.

But before that order went into effect, the defense team made it clear it will be sticking with the tactic of slamming the Boynton Beach Police Department for allegedly setting up Dippolito, which seemed to work in the second trial. They contend the police concocted the murder-for-hire story to impress producers of the reality TV show “Cops.”

The big question is how prosecutors will counter that as they try to get a conviction that sticks in the upcoming trial, scheduled for June.

Dippolito was convicted in her first trial when a jury rejected her claims — since discarded — that she was only pre-

tending to set up her husband because he wanted to do a reality TV show. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

That was thrown out on appeal after a court ruled jury selection was tainted because the jury pool heard a potential juror mention an allegation in the news that Dippolito once had tried to poison her husband with antifreeze.

The second trial ended in a 3-3 jury deadlock, even though the panel heard a 2009 recording of Dippolito telling an undercover Boynton Beach cop posing as a hit man that she was “5,000 percent sure I want it done.”

Some involved in the first two trials believe prosecutors in June might change the less-is-more strategy — fewer witnesses and an emphasis on undercover police recordings — that they used in their second attempt to convict Dippolito in December. The notice for Michael Dippolito to be prepared to take the stand could be a signal.

“I don’t suspect you’ll see as streamlined a case as trial No. 2,” said defense attorney Michael Salnick, who represented Dalia Dippolito during her first trial in 2011 and is “rooting for her to get her life back.”

Salnick says he expects the defense team to press hard on the police misconduct claims at the third trial.

“There’s a lot for the [prosecutors] to overcome,” he said.

Prosecutors Craig Williams and Laura Laurie took just a day and a half to put on their case at the second trial. They called two witnesses — the cop who posed as the hit man and the lead detective. The relied heavily on the audio and video recordings that helped score a conviction the first time.

Those tapes included Dippolito’s meetings with an ex-lover who served as a police informant.

“Nobody’s going to be able to point a finger at me,” she told Mohamed Shihadeh, the man who had tipped off police.

The jury also watched a YouTube video of Dippolito, then 26, at a policestaged crime scene, reacting after officers lied to her, saying her husband had just been killed in the couple’s townhome.

While the recordings weren’t enough to beat Dippolito’s new copswere-corrupt defense in the second trial, the prosecutors will likely lean on the recordings again because they resonated with some on both juries.

Juror Stephen Shaw, a West Boynton retiree who served on the second jury, was convinced by the recordings and called the case “one of those slam dunks.”

Shaw said he thought it was clear that Dippolito truly wanted to arrange her husband’s murder, even passing the informant photos of the intended target. And juror Linda Kniffin from the first trial has never doubted her decision to convict Dippolito.

“I’m still convinced she set up to have her husband killed,” the Lake Worth woman recently said. “She did what she did and got caught.”

Kniffin, who followed news coverage of the second trial, said that prosecutors “left out a lot.”

For one, they didn’t try to introduce any evidence of what lawyers call “prior bad acts.” This included allegations that Dalia Dippolito had previously met someone named “Larry,” a mysterious hit man and suspected gang member from Riviera Beach, concerning her desire to end her husband’s life.

And there were her alleged attempts to have Michael Dippolito arrested for possessing illegal drugs and violating a probation sentence on his fraud conviction for luring investors into a foreign currency scam.

Kniffin also noticed that Michael Dippolito, who testified for part of three days at the first trial, was not called as a prosecution witness at the retrial.

Michael Dippolito says that was disappointing.

“I feel they left so much on the table,” he told reporters after the mistrial in December.

Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley said he won’t tolerate any more news conferences by the defense that slam the cops, the prosecutors and the fact that Dippolito, 34, has spent nearly eight years on house arrest.

“In a case that has already been tried twice in this county, and in a case exposed to such pervasive media coverage, the impact on potential jurors of continued extrajudicial statements by the attorneys in this case poses a real and imminent threat … to a fair trial,” he wrote.

The prosecutors “didn’t really bring the case out” and the jury didn’t “hear the full story,” Michael Dippolito said.

“She attempted to hire people to kill me before,” he said. “She tried poisoning me, she tried to get me put in jail.

“I mean, she did a lot of things that didn’t come up [in the retrial.]”

Kelley last month put a gag order on the lawyers that prevents talking about trial preparation. The prosecutors and the defense lawyers are barred from talking to the media about the “first or second trial of this case, including the results of those trials.”

Dippolito