The Connecticut Supreme Court has affirmed a lower court’s decision to deny a new trial for James Hilton, a man serving 65 years for a fatal shooting that took place during a New Haven drug turf war more than a quarter-century ago.
In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Gregory T. D’Auria, the high court rejected Hilton’s argument that his conviction should be overturned because his defense attorneys failed to adequately challenge a state medical examiner’s claim that the fatal shot was fired at point-blank range.
The case traces back to July 2000, when William Rodriguez was found shot to death on a sidewalk on Truman Street in New Haven. Investigators tied the killing to an ongoing dispute between Hilton and Rodriguez’s associates. At trial, two eyewitnesses identified Hilton as the shooter, and a third saw the shooting take place. Police also discovered a drop of the victim’s blood on Hilton’s clothing.
A central debate at the original criminal trial was the physical distance between the shooter and the victim. The state called an associate medical examiner, Arkady Katsnelson, who testified that the shape and size of the wound indicated it was a contact wound, meaning the gun barrel was touching the victim’s skin when fired. Hilton’s trial attorney cross-examined Katsnelson but did not call a competing expert to argue that the shot came from a distance.
Hilton subsequently filed multiple petitions for a writ of habeas corpus to challenge the lawfulness of his imprisonment. In his first habeas petition, Hilton’s defense team brought in the state’s chief medical examiner and a forensic scientist to critique Katsnelson’s work, but the petition was denied after the court found the original defense strategy reasonable and the new testimony ambiguous.
In his second habeas petition, which led to the Supreme Court’s current ruling, Hilton presented testimony from forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht. Wecht testified that the gun had to be at least 24 inches away from Rodriguez because the autopsy photographs showed no gunpowder residue or skin abrasions known as stippling.
However, the lower habeas court refused to credit Wecht’s findings. The court noted that Wecht had failed to review the testimony of the state’s chief medical examiner from the first appeal, who had identified distinct features of a contact wound on the body, such as a “stellate,” or starlike, tear in the skin caused by a blowback explosion from the gun barrel. The judge also pointed out that Wecht did not account for the fact that the victim was kept alive for more than a day to harvest organs, a process during which the body was washed and disinfected, potentially erasing gunpowder residue.
On appeal to the Supreme Court, Hilton’s attorney, Alexander T. Taubes, argued that the lower court used an incorrect legal standard to judge Wecht’s credibility. Taubes pointed to a 2015 Connecticut Supreme Court precedent, Lapointe v. Commissioner of Correction, which allowed for elevated scrutiny of a judge’s dismissal of expert testimony.
The Supreme Court disagreed, clarifying that the Lapointe ruling was a rare exception born out of highly unusual circumstances where a trial judge made factual findings completely unsupported by the record in a case where the state’s evidence was otherwise weak.
In Hilton’s case, the justices found that the lower court’s skepticism of the expert witness was well-grounded in the facts. The court emphasized that the state’s original case against Hilton was far from weak, noting that identification was not an issue since the parties knew each other.
“There were two eyewitnesses who remained on the scene and gave statements to [the] police identifying [Hilton] as the shooter and placing him standing right next to the victim when he was shot,” the court wrote.
With all participating justices concurring, the Supreme Court concluded that the presence of another expert witness would not have changed the outcome of the original trial, leaving Hilton’s 65-year sentence intact.
READ: High-Stakes Georgia Election Rules Fight Pushed Straight To State Supreme Court
Please make a small donation to the Tampa Free Press to help sustain independent journalism. Your contribution enables us to continue delivering high-quality, local, and national news coverage.
Sign up: Subscribe to our free newsletter for a curated selection of top stories delivered straight to your inbox.
