Trial of Man in ’75 Slaying Spurs Search for Precedent

In an era when criminal defendants as young as 12 years old are routinely tried as adults, prosecutors and legal scholars are baffled by the prospect of a 39-year-old man standing trial as a juvenile in a notorious murder case.

Michael Skakel is balding and sports a paunch. Yet on Feb. 8, he will appear in a Connecticut juvenile court for arraignment in the fatal bludgeoning 25 years ago in Greenwich of 15-year-old Martha Moxley. How this process will work is a subject of hot legal debate.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Skakel’s own attorney, Michael Sherman. “This is a make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along case.”

The peculiar legal turn of events was set in motion last week when a Connecticut Superior Court judge sitting as a one-man grand jury issued an arrest warrant for Skakel, who was 15 at the time of the crime. He immediately flew to Connecticut from his home in Hobe Sound, Fla., turned himself in and was released on $500,000 bond.

In Connecticut, anyone 16 years old or older is tried for crimes as an adult. As the Connecticut state law stood in 1975, when Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club, the longest prison term a juvenile convicted of murder could receive was four years.

State law at that time allowed a juvenile murder case in some circumstances to be transferred to an adult court. In Skakel’s case, under the 1975 law, if convicted of murder as an adult, he would face a minimum of 25 years and a maximum of 60 years in prison.

Arresting Skakel as a juvenile sounded so bizarre to juvenile justice expert Ira M. Schwartz, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, that he assumed he misheard. “This defies the laws of gravity,” Schwartz said.

Increasingly, young people across the country who commit serious crimes are being tried and sentenced as adults. Garrett Capune, director of the Delinquency Control Institute at USC, said the determination to move a juvenile into adult court was generally based on both the severity of the crime and the sophistication of the perpetrator. “A prosecutor can walk in and ask that a case be remanded to an adult court, and nowadays that’s quite common,” Capune said.

In 15 years of prosecuting juvenile cases in Los Angeles County, Assistant Dist. Atty. Frank Vanella said he could think of no legal precedent for this type of action. He also said he had never seen a case this old activated, and introduced into juvenile court. Although the action requires prosecutors to “at least start in juvenile court,” Vanella predicted the case would swiftly move to an adult venue.

But Connecticut state’s attorney Hillary Bargar, the juvenile prosecutor for Bridgeport, said another complication is that Long Lane School in Middletown, the state’s high-security facility for juveniles, will not commingle youthful inmates with anyone 18 or older. “At 18 years old, Long Lane says see you later,” Bargar said.

Bargar--who is not involved in the Skakel-Moxley matter --noted that the juvenile law in effect in 1975 was actually drafted in 1971, “a completely different world from what we have now” in terms of serious juvenile crimes.

“Even when I first became a prosecutor way back in 1986, if a juvenile drug case, a heroin case, came to juvenile court, it was like, ‘Oh my!’ Now it’s daily, and you’re desensitized,” Bargar said.

Putting the Moxley case in the light of a law only slightly older than the crime itself, “you have to ask yourself about that elusive concept of justice,” said Bargar. “If a person is guilty of murdering a 15-year-old girl with a golf club, do you really think four years in Long Lane is fair?”

In a climate where young offenders often receive harsh sentences as adults, trying a 39-year-old as a juvenile “could create a lot of outrage,” said professor Schwartz. In the meantime, Skakel’s lawyer said both sides are heavily researching the possibility of precedent.