Months after the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered two new criminal trials in the corruption cases of former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, Perez’s attorney is now seeking a dismissal.
Perez was convicted in 2010 in two separate schemes -- one extortion, the other bribery. The court tried those cases together, but in the end, the state’s highest court said that move was unfair.
Now, as the two trials gear up, Perez attorney Hubert Santos argues that Perez’s case should be dismissed because his right to testify was infringed in his original trial.
Santos said the right to testify is bedrock; take it away, and a defendant’s due process rights are taken too. The result, he said should be a dismissal. He also concedes that this is a “novel question of law.”
State prosecutors have opposed the move, saying in a court filing that trial court errors of this nature shouldn’t result in a dismissal.
The case goes back nearly a decade, when a developer first alleged that Perez tried to get him to pay off a city political boss in order to get his deal done. That got the interest of state investigators, who then uncovered a second thread: Perez allegedly took discounted home improvements from a city contractor. In exchange, when that contractor was failing on a city job, Perez was alleged to have intervened on his behalf.
Eventually, the state formed a grand jury to investigate the case and in January 2009, Perez was arrested.
A state court judge decided to combine the two cases into one trial for the purposes of judicial economy. The former mayor was convicted in both schemes in June of 2010, and he resigned soon after. He was sentenced to three years in prison; he also appealed his convictions.
In that appeal, Santos said the court never should have combined the two cases against him. In fact, he argued that the combining of the two cases meant Perez couldn’t get a fair treatment from a jury. He won that argument last July at the Connecticut Supreme Court, and the court ordered two new trials.
Argument on the motion to dismiss is scheduled for January 17.
