News for Norm Pattis

As jury selection began in the murder trial of Darnell Moore in New London Superior Court, his attorney, Norm Pattis, noticed something about the first three groups of possible jurors - there were very few African Americans in fact only three out of the 117 people on the panels.
Pattis argued to the judge that Moore, who is African-American, had his right to a fair trial violated because the jury wasn’t a representative cross section of his peers. The judge ruled against him, Moore...

A lawyer for Tony Moreno, the Middletown man who was convicted of killing his infant son in 2015, argued in front of the state’s highest court Thursday that his client deserves a new trial because he was medicated and not in the right frame of mind when police questioned him in his hospital bed.
Moreno was convicted of murder and risk of injury to a child in 2017, two years after throwing his 7-moth-old son Aaden off Middletown’s Arrigoni Bridge. Moreno was sentenced by Judge...

A man convicted of killing his infant son by throwing him off a bridge headed to the state's highest court on Thursday.
Tony Moreno, 24, was sentenced to 70 years in prison in 2017 for throwing 7-month-old Aaden off of the Arrigoni Bridge in 2015.
On Thursday, attorneys on both sides talked to a panel of seven judges about whether or not police made mistakes while interviewing Moreno in his hospital room.
Moreno's attorney, Norm Pattis, said that Moreno was interviewed while...

The state’s highest court will hear arguments on Thursday about whether a Middletown man convicted last year of throwing his 7-month-old son off a bridge knowingly waived his Miranda rights while he was on suicide watch at Hartford Hospital.
Tony Moreno, 24, was sentenced in May to 70 years in prison for throwing his infant son, Aaden, off the Arrigoni Bridge before attempting suicide on July 5, 2015. He was convicted of murder and risk of injury to a child and is not eligible for...

A Connecticut man convicted of threatening the judge in his divorce case is arguing free speech rights in taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Edward Taupier of Cromwell has filed documents asking the court to hear his appeal of a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling in September that rejected his free speech arguments.
Taupier is serving an 18-month prison sentence for threatening Judge Elizabeth Bozzuto. Prosecutors said Taupier sent an email to six acquaintances in 2014 that...

Police in Washington, D.C., have closed their investigation into an allegation that suspended Yale student Saifullah Khan sexually assaulted two people, and authorities will not pursue charges against him, Khan’s attorney said Wednesday.
After receiving the news, Khan quickly wrote a letter to Yale College Dean Marvin Chun, asking him to lift the “emergency suspension” the university imposed against him when the allegations were published in the Yale Daily...

Saifullah Khan — the Yale student who was suspended in October in response to new allegations of sexual assault against him— will not return to campus this semester, as his legal battle to return to Yale has been postponed until January.
Khan, who was acquitted on four counts of sexual assault in March, was suspended on Oct. 7 — two days after the News published allegations of sexual misconduct levied against him by Jon Andrews, a former confidant of Khan’s. Three...

"This is a shocking case. This is a case that calls for jury nullification."
Many have had similar reactions when confronting cases involving authorities running roughshod over people with bad laws, punitive sentences, and ill-considered prosecutions. But this time, the person invoking jury nullification was a federal judge—District Judge Stefan R. Underhill of the District of Connecticut—and he spoke in court about a case over which he presided.
The prosecution that...

The city rarely gets to host an honest-to-goodness Russian oligarch.
But there Shalva Chigirinsky was, pacing the fifth floor of the Fairfield County Courthouse on Tuesday in an impeccably tailored suit, amidst the poor and disenfranchised.
The 67-year-old Chigirinsky was once considered one of Russia’s richest men, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at $1.6 billion. But that was before his divorce in 2009 from Tatiana Panchenkova, a willowy blond and daughter of a former...

A Yale student who was acquitted earlier this year of sexually assaulting a female student reportedly has been suspended by university officials in the wake of allegations by a former male friend of his that he sexually assaulted him.
Saifullah Khan was notified several days ago by Yale College Dean Marvin M. Chun that he was suspended immediately from Yale College because of an “emergency,” according to the Hartford Courant.
The letter by Chun to Khan reportedly said...