Tempest to be re-tried this fall?

WOONSOCKET – If all goes according to plan, Raymond D. “Beaver” Tempest Jr. could go on trial a second time for the 1982 murder of prom queen Doreen C. Picard as soon as this autumn, state prosecutors say.

The Office of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin said months ago it was planning to retry Tempest for the murder, but Amy Kempe provided more specifics about the timeline Wednesday.

“Nothing has changed…” she said in an mail. “The state is preparing the case for trial, which we anticipate taking place in the fall.”

Tempest spent more than 24 years in prison for the murder of Picard, 22, and the brutal beating of her 27-year-old landlady, Susan Laferte, in the basement of a Providence Street tenement more than 35 years ago. He was freed on bail after Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini struck down Tempest’s conviction in July 2015, concluding that he did not get a fair trial because prosecutors withheld evidence about a witness who kept changing her statements and the police had coached witnesses.

Though Procaccini vacated the jury verdict, he stopped short of declaring Tempest innocent, but he declared that Tempest enjoys the presumption of innocence, much as anyone else who is merely accused of a crime.

Handing down a split decision, the state Supreme Court upheld Proccacini’s ruling in 2016. In a move prosecutors described as rare, they asked the high court to reconsider the decision on the belief that members had erred. But the high court later reaffirmed the decision.

Now 64 years old, Tempest has remained on home confinement at an undisclosed location in Rhode Island since September 2015.

During his 1992 Superior Court trial, prosecutors argued that Tempest strangled Picard with her own sweater and pummeled her

with a length of pipe when she stumbled across him beating Laferte in the basement of 409 Providence St. A string of witnesses testified that Tempest boasted to them of having committed the crime but that he would get away with it because of his powerful connections to law enforcement. His brother was a detective on the Woonsocket Police Department and his father was the high sheriff for Providence County and for- mer second-in-command of the WPD.

“I’ll slide,” he was quoted as saying. “I’m a Tempest.”

But all of those witnesses, and others – nine who testified – have all died in the years following the trial, raising questions about the kind of case Kilmartin’s office may now mount against Tempest.

Tempest was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 85 years in prison. But he has steadfastly maintained his innocence and his lawyers say he turned down opportunities for parole because he’d rather be fully vindicated than admit responsibility for a crime he did not commit.

He never testified during the trial, but he took the witness stand for the first time during the hearing that led Procaccini to strike down the conviction. On the stand, Tempest insisted he gave a series of false statements to the police about his whereabouts on the day of the murder because he did not want his police relatives to know he was actually breaking the law in a different way – by driving around with his brother-in-law and doing drugs.

Tempest’s conviction was vacated after a long battle that was taken on by lawyers from the New England Innocence Project. Based in Boston, the organization provides pro-bono legal assistance to individuals it believes have been wrongfully convicted of a crime.

The lead attorney for the NEIP is Michael Kendall, a partner with the firm White & Case. He could not be reached for comment on this story.