Prosecutors, Cops May Testify
Defense Wants Answers On Handling Of Documents
Roles will be reversed in a New Britain courtroom as defense attorneys are expected to grill state prosecutors and state police detectives over their handling of documents they seized during their investigation of the killing of a UConn medical school professor and the arrest of his wife.
Those documents include a note authorities say Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi wrote about how she killed her husband with a hammer after an argument over work she wanted him to do on their deck. The contents are in a public arrest warrant, but whether a jury should ever get to hear the details is at question.
The defense claims the notes and other documents are protected by the attorney-client privilege. The lawyers for Kosuda-Bigazzi argue her rights were violated and want a judge to toss out the murder case against her. She is accused of using a hammer to beat to death her husband, Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi.
The case drew even wider attention and prompted an investigation at UConn after it was learned the medical school continued to pay Bigazzi his salary of $200,000 for months after the slaying, unaware that he was dead.
New Britain Superior Court Judge Vernon D. Oliver will hold what is
known as a “Lenarz hearing” to determine if the documents, some taken from a filing cabinet, should not have been viewed by state investigators. The hearing will begin Monday and could last several days.
Kosuda-Bigazzi is accused of murder in the death of her husband whose body, police say, she wrapped in plastic and stored in the basement of their Burlington home for several months.
Bigazzi was last seen at UConn in July 2017 and was not in regular contact with his supervisors. The university paid his salary until his body was discovered in February, after UConn officials asked police to check on his well-being.
One of the documents in question — handwritten notes by Kosuda-Bigazzi that could be considered a confession — was included in the arrest warrant used to charge her with murder. The warrant has been made public.
In those notes, Kosuda-Bigazzi described a brawl during which she struck her husband with a hammer after he came at her following an argument over work on the deck. State police found blood spatter on the kitchen floor, ceiling and cabinets.
Kosuda-Bigazzi’s lawyers, Patrick Tomasiewicz and Brian Karpe, argue that the notes are covered by attorney-client privilege and that police should not have taken them. Citing a case, State vs. Lenarz, they argue the murder case against KosudaBigazzi should be dismissed because there is no way she can get a fair trial.
In the Lenarz case, police and prosecutors viewed documents related to legal strategy they found on the defendant’s computer that fell under the attorney-client privilege. The state Supreme Court eventually overturned the conviction.
Tomasiewicz and Karpe will argue police accessed attorney-client communications and tainted the case.
“The genesis of this situation starts with the execution of a search warrant. There were enough stop signs in these exhibits, enough red lights that once the state received these materials they shouldn’t have been reviewed” by state police or prosecutors, Tomasiewicz argued at a recent hearing.
Tomasiewicz wants the judge to issue a rare order to force New Britain State’s Attorney Brian Preleski and Assistant State’s Attorney Helen McClellen, who signed the arrest warrant, to testify at the hearing. They also have asked Oliver to seal the courtroom for the entire hearing, a request that the judge denied. Oliver did leave open the possibility of closing the courtroom for parts of testimony.
State police detectives in the Western District Major Crime Squad have been called to testify. The defense has also called three experts to testify: defense attorneys Willie Dow Jr. and Hubert Santos and attorney Mark Dubois, an ethics expert.
“I know that Preleski received materials that he shouldn’t have,” Tomasiewicz told Oliver at the previous hearing. “There should have been a much more careful analysis of what went into that warrant.”
Oliver asked Tomasiewicz if he knew of other cases in the pretrial stage in which a state’s attorney wasn’t allowed to argue a motion to dismiss a murder case. He didn’t have an answer.
“There certainly haven’t been many cases in Connecticut like it,” Oliver said.
University of Connecticut Law School Professor Todd D. Fernow agrees with the judge.
“Lenarz is clearly on point here and the defense team is doing exactly as they should pursuing a record,” Fernow said.
Fernow said the judge will have to determine if the information is indeed privileged and “strategic” to the defense. Then he will have to determine how the state came to possess it, what it did with it and what any potential remedy there may be.
Two of the documents were clearly labeled attorney’s files, Tomasiewicz said. It is unclear what is in those files because they are sealed. The third file was the handwritten note by Kosuda-Bigazzi, the contents of which were included in the arrest warrant.
Tomasiewicz said the notes were sandwiched between the two attorney files and they could be seen as the product of questions Kosuda-Bigazzi asked her attorneys.
In State vs. Lenarz, Patrick Lenarz, a former karate instructor from Simsbury, was convicted in March 2007 of risk of injury after police said he improperly touched a minor.
Lawyer Kevin Ferry of New Britain argued that Lenarz’s constitutional rights were violated after police and prosecutors read documents on Lenarz’s computer.
In a 4-2 decision, the state Supreme Court found the “defendant was presumptively prejudiced by the prosecutor’s intrusion into the privileged communications taken from the defendant’s computer because the privileged materials contained a highly specific and detailed trial strategy.”
The justices said that any remedy other than dismissing the charges would be “a miscarriage of justice.” Lenarz was released from prison in November 2010, three years into his four-year sentence.
Oliver appointed a state inspector to help Assistant State’s Attorney Christopher Watson, who is handling the case for the New Britain prosecutor’s office. Prosecutors brought what they called the “unintended intrusion” into the documents to the attention of New Britain Superior Court Judge Joan K. Alexander and KosudaBigazzi’s defense attorneys in late April. In May, Alexander removed the New Britain prosecutors from the case and set in motion the process to review the documents.
If it survives the Lenarz hearing, the murder case will likely be transferred to Hartford State’s Attorney Gail Hardy’s office, Watson said. The state police Western District Major Crime Squad has also been removed from the case. Further investigation will be conducted by the Central District Major Crime Squad.
Fernow said given that it is a murder case, the bar for dismissal will be high. He said moving the case out of New Britain was a wise move.
“They may have nipped it in the bud early enough that they can completely remove the information in question and start fresh with a pristine prosecutor,” Fernow said. “They may have to go back and re-investigate the whole case and issue a new arrest warrant and start all over.”
To allow the public and media to view the hearing, Karpe and Tomasiewicz argued, would harm Kosuda-Bigazzi because the protected information might be revealed. Tomasiewicz said he will question police officers and others about whether they saw the protected information, which anyone could inadvertently blurt out.
Some of the privileged information, the lawyers argued, has already been released to the public because it was quoted in the warrant for Kosuda-Bigazzi’s arrest.
The body of Pierluigi Bigazzi was found Feb. 5 in the basement of the Burlington home he and his wife shared, wrapped in plastic trash bags and duct tape, according to the arrest warrant.
Officials at UConn Health asked police to check on Bigazzi’s well-being after they hadn’t heard from him for months. UConn Health officers went to his Burlington home on Feb. 5, knocked at the door and heard activity in the house, but got no response.
They then contacted state and Burlington police, who also knocked at the door. Around the same time, attorney Brian Karpe called the Litchfield state police barracks and told them he had received a call from Kosuda-Bigazzi telling him state police were at the house. Karpe told police that he was on his way and that they should not enter the house or talk to KosudaBigazzi.
When Karpe arrived, he spoke briefly with Kosuda-Bigazzi, then let police in. Burlington police Officer Kevin Mellon noted “insect activity” in the house and found the body in the basement.
“Based upon the levels of decomposition, it was apparent that the individual had been deceased for an extended period of time,” the warrant says.
Just when Bigazzi was killed is not clear. He was at a doctor’s appointment in Massachusetts on June 13, 2017, and his supervisor at UConn received an email from him on July 6. UConn continued to pay Bigazzi’s salary of about $200,000 despite losing contact with him for much of 2017.
Kosuda-Bigazzi, through her lawyers, paid back to UConn $50,040.85, which represents the wages added to Bigazzi’s bank account by automatic deposit from Aug. 4, 2017 through Jan. 18, 2018, the last payroll period for which he was paid as a UConn faculty member.