Michael Skakel’s Murder Conviction Overturned
Michael Skakel, the 57-year-old nephew of Robert F. Kennedy's widow Ethel Kennedy, today had his conviction for the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley overturned in Connecticut Supreme Court.
The stunning 4-3 ruling hinged on the assertion that Skakel's trial attorney, Michael Sherman, failed to present evidence of an alibi on the night in question in wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, when both Moxely and Skakel were just 15 years old. (Moxley was allegedly bludgeoned to death with a golf club.) The decision reversed the high court's previous ruling in December 2016, which reinstated Skakel's conviction after a lower court ordered a new trial, citing mistakes by Sherman.
Skakel was previously sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, but was freed on $1.2 million bail after the lower court overturned his murder conviction in 2013.
Fighting the conviction has not been cheap. In 2013, the New York Times asserted that "Skakel and his family have spared no expense in their efforts to clear his name," including hiring "expensive lawyers, private investigators and expert witnesses, one at $250 an hour."
It's been a campaign, the newspaper reports, "that very few criminal defendants can hope to marshal; the price of fighting the conviction has "run well into the millions of dollars" and "drained the family fortune." It's likely that Michael is now worth less than $1 million-a far cry from his privileged upbringing in Greenwich.
"You know the father died broke," Anna Mae Skakel, Michael's 76-year-old stepmother, the widow of his father, Rushton, told the Times. "The trusts are all gone. Everything’s gone."
The fortune came from Michael Skakel's paternal grandfather, industrial magnate George Skakel, who died in 1957 in a plane crash with his wife, Ann. In 2007, Michael "received the same $383,000 that his siblings received in final distributions from the grandparents’ trusts by the time they wound down."
Despite that windfall, Michael Skakel’s cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "confirmed that resources were running low and that [he] had to sell his small house in the Catskills, near the home of his son. "He couldn’t hold onto it," Kennedy told the Times.
With reporting from the Associated Press
You Might Also Like
