The 93-year-old girl was discovered robbed and bludgeoned to demise in her personal Connecticut residence.
It was a horrible scene to come back upon, because the sufferer, Isabella Mehner, was present in 2019 in a pool of blood on the backside of the basement stairs of her Stamford residence, in keeping with the Connecticut Supreme Court docket, which has affirmed the conviction within the case.
In 2023, a person who had as soon as carried out upkeep work for her was sentenced to 85 years in jail for breaking into her residence and killing her.
Robert C. Simmons, then 54, had been discovered responsible in February 2023 of homicide, felony homicide, residence invasion and first-degree housebreaking in connection to the lethal residence invasion.
However then Simmons appealed his conviction.
He claimed within the attraction that “the proof was inadequate to assist his conviction and that the trial court docket had improperly declined to instruct the jury on his third-party culpability protection,” and that the prosecutor dedicated a number of improprieties throughout closing and rebuttal arguments, which disadvantaged him of his due course of proper to a good trial, in keeping with the Supreme Court docket ruling.
The ruling stated the state introduced enough proof to “fulfill its burden of building the defendant’s guilt past an affordable doubt, because it was affordable and logical for the jury to deduce that the defendant was the perpetrator of the crimes of which he was convicted on the idea of sure video surveillance footage and forensic proof introduced at trial, in addition to sure contradictory statements that he had made throughout his interviews with the police.”
Additional, the court docket ruling stated, opposite to the Simmons’ assertion, “it was of no consequence that the jury may have construed the proof persistently with an informal go to to the sufferer’s residence, as he had claimed throughout one among his interviews with the police, as a result of the jury was not barred from drawing these inferences in step with guilt and was not required to attract solely these inferences in step with innocence.
“The trial court docket didn’t abuse its discretion in declining to instruct the jury on the defendant’s third-party culpability protection, which was premised on his argument {that a} sure DNA profile discovered on a bloody hammer discovered close to the sufferer’s physique straight linked an unknown male to the crimes.”
The court docket discovered that “though a bloody hammer discovered close to the sufferer’s physique was the seemingly the homicide weapon and subsequently had an in depth and proximate relationship to the homicide, the video surveillance footage, the outcomes of the police investigation, and the quotidian nature of the hammer led this court docket to conclude that the totality of the proof adduced at trial was inadequate to allow an affordable juror to deduce {that a} third occasion was liable for the sufferer’s homicide.”
The court docket additionally discovered no benefit to Simmons’ declare that a few of the prosecutor’s remarks made throughout closing and rebuttal arguments had been improper and disadvantaged him of a good trial.
“With respect to the prosecutor’s feedback relating to DNA proof discovered on the defendant’s denims and ‘in’ the sufferer’s fingernails, and a remark relating to the sufferer’s struggle or battle with the defendant, the prosecutor didn’t mischaracterize the information in proof or encourage the jury to make unreasonable factual inferences, as these feedback had been rooted within the proof introduced and the affordable inferences that could possibly be drawn therefrom,” the ruling stated.
Additional, the ruling discovered that in regard “to the prosecutor’s remark throughout rebuttal argument characterizing protection counsel’s principle of the case as ‘misleading,’ the prosecutor didn’t disparage protection counsel personally or his institutional function within the proceedings however, somewhat, criticized protection counsel’s principle of the case on the bottom that it was ‘poor,’ ‘dismissive,’ and ‘misleading’ as a result of it didn’t account for the proof of the defendant’s guilt, notably the video surveillance footage and DNA proof, and the prosecutor’s remark was in direct response to protection counsel’s closing argument, through which he described the state’s case as ‘‘poor, dismissive, [and] misleading’ within the first occasion.”
The case towards Simmons was tried on the Superior Court docket within the Judicial District of Stamford-Norwalk.
When it comes to a few of what the court docket reviewed from the trial, the ruling stated that Mehner’s members of the family went to her home after not having the ability to attain her on Sept. 25, 2019, and had been stunned to see that the display screen door was unlocked and that the again door was open. The kinfolk discovered her on the backside of the basement stairs. “Emergency medical responders discovered the sufferer chilly to the contact and unresponsive. Makes an attempt to resuscitate the sufferer had been unsuccessful, and she or he was pronounced lifeless on the scene at 8:22 p.m.,” the court docket doc notes.
Additionally, her pockets, which “usually contained money and was saved in her purse, was discovered empty and lined in blood on the backside of the basement stairs close to her physique. The police additionally decided that the sufferer’s marriage ceremony rings, which she at all times wore on her left hand, had been lacking and that her left hand was severely wounded,” the court docket doc stated. “Lastly, the lid to the jewellery field within the sufferer’s bed room was left open, which was uncommon, though no jewellery seemed to be lacking.”
(The ruling famous that the jewellery field within the sufferer’s bed room was topic to forensic testing, and there have been three completely different DNA profiles current, one among which was that of a male, however the defendant was excluded as a contributor.)
“In accordance with the health worker, the sufferer suffered a number of focal impression accidents to the top, lots of which had been curvilinear in nature, in step with people who could be attributable to the hammer discovered close to the sufferer’s physique,” the ruling stated. “Moreover, there have been abrasion accidents on her neck, bruising on her legs, and a deep laceration on her left hand. “
Paul J. Ferencek, state’s lawyer for Stamford and Norwalk, stated on the time Simmons was sentenced, “Though the 85-year sentence is in some ways symbolic given the defendant’s age, hopefully the sufferer’s household will discover some closure in understanding that he’ll in all probability spend the remainder of his life incarcerated.”
