Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Court denies felon a 4th trial
Dalia Dippolito’s murder-for-hire case won’t be reviewed
Dalia Dippolito, South Florida’s notorious murderfor-hire schemer, is running out of appeals.
The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled it will not consider the 36-year-old felon’s bid for a fourth trial. The justices did not elaborate on the decision.
This defeat comes 10 years after her videotaped arrest in Boynton Beach — for hiring a cop posing as a hit man to kill her newlywed husband.
But her lawyers say they won’t give up on their “pursuit of justice for Ms. Dippolito.”
“We intend on bringing the case to the Supreme Court of the United States,” Andrew Greenlee and Greg Rosenfeld said in a statement.
Dippolito is serving a 16-year state prison sentence that will keep her locked up until July 5, 2032, unless her 2017 conviction is tossed.
She faces long odds in getting the nation’s high court to take the case.
According to the United States Courts official website, the Supreme Court agrees to hear 100 to 150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it is asked to review each year.
A doomed marriage
The history of this highly publicized case has all the staples of a made-for-TV courtroom drama.
Dalia Mohammed and Michael Dippolito married in February 2009, four months after he says she showed up at his door as a paid escort.
The romance faded quickly. Prosecutors said she was a manipulative seductress motivated by greed — stealing more than $100,000 from her spouse and taking the title to his townhouse.
Her lawyers tried to cast Michael Dippolito as an abusive husband and a thief. His record includes a 2003 Broward County fraud conviction for luring investors, many of them elderly, into a foreign currency scam.
At her last trial two years ago, jurors heard accusations that after the wedding, Dalia Dippolito:
— Tried for months to get her husband arrested and thrown in jail for a parole violation.
— Spoke with a potential Riviera Beach hit man named Larry, and also attempted to get her own gun.
— Tried to poison her spouse by spiking his tea with antifreeze.
— Exchanged racy text messages with a boyfriend, Mike Stanley, about her intentions to “destroy” her husband.
Police got involved in late July 2009, after a different lover, Mohamed Shihadeh, called Boynton Beach Police to say he was concerned either Dippolito or her husband would wind up dead. Shihadeh immediately went to work for police as a confidential informant.
Crime caught on camera
In one video, Dippolito told Shihadeh she wanted her husband’s life to end. She handed over $1,200 that was to be used for the hit man — actually the undercover
officer — to buy a gun and cellphones for the job. Dippolito also gave Shihadeh a few photos of Michael Dippolito.
The jury also watched a video of her meeting the pretend hit man and telling him she was “like 5,000 percent sure” she wanted Michael Dippolito to get two bullets to the head.
Police made sure to keep him alive and well. Officers staged a murder scene at the couple’s home and filmed officers confronting her on the morning of Aug. 5, 2009.
“Listen, we had a report of a disturbance at your house, and there were shots fired,” an officer says with a straight face. “Is your husband Michael? OK, I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am, he’s been killed.”
As soon as Dippolito was taken to the police station, the agency posted the video on YouTube, where it went viral with close to 500,000 views.
In a final video, Dippolito learns she’s not a young widow, and that her encounter with the undercover officer/fake hit man had been secretly recorded.
Three trials and a baby
In 2011, Dippolito was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. That was later overturned on appeal, and while on house arrest awaiting her retrial, Dippolito gave birth to a son in 2016.
The second trial ended in a hung jury, but the third trial in 2017 resulted in a swift guilty verdict on the solicitation to commit firstdegree murder charge.
She’s been locked up in the annex of Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
In March, the Fourth District Court of Appeal rejected Dippolito’s main argument that the trial judge mistakenly allowed the jury to hear about the alleged antifreeze poisoning try.
Dippolito’s lawyers also argued the judge erred by not permitting jurors to consider her contention that police “manufactured” the crime — to impress the producers of the “COPS” television program — a legal term called “objective entrapment.”
In its opinion, the appellate court found the judge made the right call both times. The prosecutors were allowed to cite the antifreeze incident to discredit Mohamed Shihadeh’s initial testimony that he told police he didn’t think she was serious about killing her husband.
Shihadeh wound up testifying that Dippolito once told him she went online to research a type of antifreeze that has no color or smell, and she had put it in her husband’s drink, and he spit it out.
Recent arguments
This summer, Dippolito’s attorneys asked Florida’s highest court to take the case.
They argued the Supreme Court should step in to resolve a conflict between the appellate court’s ruling in her case and legal findings in cases from other courts.
Greenlee and Rosenfeld wrote that the prosecution made a pretrial stipulation not to use the antifreeze claim, and that a “formal” notice was required to do so, based on previous court rulings in other similar cases.
But an Aug. 15 response, co-written by Florida Chief Assistant Attorney General Carla Suzanne Bechard, argues the Dippolito trial court properly allowed the poisoning claim.
Bechard also contended the case does not warrant a review by the Supreme Court concerning the defense claim that Dippolito was the victim of a set-up.