Kennedy cousin’s murder conviction stands

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand the murder conviction of Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, who is serving a prison term of at least 20 years.

The justices declined, without comment, to take Skakel’s appeal of his conviction in the beating death of his Greenwich, Conn., neighbor, Martha Moxley, 31 years ago when the two were teenagers. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was convicted in 2002.

Skakel, 46, is serving 20 years to life in prison. His lawyer, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, had argued that the deadline for prosecuting Skakel passed 19 years before he was arrested in January 2000.

At the time of Moxley’s killing, Connecticut had a five-year statute of limitations on murder cases that did not involve the death penalty. One year later, in 1976, the state Legislature removed the five-year deadline in such cases.

The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld Skakel’s conviction, overturning its earlier holding that the new law did not apply to crimes committed before its enactment.

In other cases:

* The high court refused to intervene to keep an American facing a death sentence in Iraq from being handed over to authorities in Baghdad.

Muhammad Munaf has been in custody in Iraq since last year. He was sentenced to death last month by an Iraqi judge for his role in the kidnapping of three Romanian journalists in Baghdad.

He said his trial was flawed and his confession coerced.

Munaf wanted the justices to order military authorities to keep him under their control until U.S. courts resolved whether U.S. forces can turn over to the Iraqi government Americans who are suspected terrorists.

The court gave no explanation for its order Monday denying Munaf’s request.

* The court refused to hear an appeal by author Lewis Perdue, who said that parts of Dan Brown’s bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code,” were copied from one of his novels.

Without comment, the justices declined to review a ruling by a U.S. appeals court in New York that the two books are not substantially similar and that Brown’s suspense novel does not infringe the other book’s copyright.

The appeals court had upheld a similar ruling by a federal judge.