Fellow attorneys say Entwistle defenders faced long odds

June 25, 2008 07:24 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff

Jeffrey A. Denner knows all too well the challenges of defending someone accused of a monstrous crime. Just last Friday, a New Hampshire jury rejected his claim that a woman he was defending was insane when she kiiled her two boyfriends because she believed she was an angel sent by God to punish pedophiles.

So the Boston criminal defense lawyer was hardly surprised when a Middlesex County jury convicted Neil Entwistle yesterday of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of his wife, Rachel, and 9-month-old daughter, Lillian Rose, after deliberating less than two days.

"In all cases, you're dealt a certain hand, and you're stuck with those cards," he said. "This was a case where, when you were looking at the cards [Entwistle's lawyers] were holding, it wasn't a particularly good hand. As a matter of fact, it was about as bad a hand as you can get. You have a high-profile case, a wildly unpopular defendant, and an absolutely horrendous crime."

Over and over today, members of Boston's tight-knit defense bar said the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against Entwistle made it highly unlikely that his lawyers, Elliot Weinstein and Stephanie Page, could win an acquittal.

Perhaps nothing was more damning than Entwistle's decision to take a flight to England without calling authorities after -- according to his own account -- he discovered the bodies of his wife and daughter, said criminal defense attorneys.

"Nobody finds their wife and baby daughter dead and doesn't call the cops," said Robert M. Griffin, another defense lawyer in Denner's firm and a former Suffolk County prosecutor.

Add the other elements of the state's case -- including testimony that in the days before the slayings Entwistle's computer was used to troll for paid escort services and conduct Google searches on how to kill someone -- and the prospects for an acquittal seemed to vanish.

(In a post-verdict news conference, prosecutor Michael Fabbri noted that, "In the end, I think Entwistle is probably the best evidence we have in this case.")

Moreover, the lawyers said, it was impossible to overestimate the potential impact of the wall-to-wall pretrial publicity about the murder case. Shortly after the bodies of Entwistle's wife and daughter were found in their rented Hopkinton house on Jan. 22, 2006, the smiling faces of the young family appeared on the cover of People magazine under the headline: ``Who killed Rachel and her baby.'' Entwistle's lawyers asked the judge to move the trial because of the publicity, to no avail.

Many casual courtroom observers were startled when Entwistle's lawyers called no witnesses after the state rested Monday. But several defense lawyers said they probably would have done the same thing and that Entwistle's attorneys did their best to challenge the state's case through cross-examination of prosecution witnesses.

"There's a general feeling among the defense bar that by presenting witnesses, you often cause the jury to believe that the defense has some burden of proof that it doesn't," said another defense lawyer, James Budreau. "Unless you're going to put on the defendant, or you're going to use some diminished capacity defense, what witnesses are you going to put on that will sway a jury in the face of that evidence?"

Another Boston defense lawyer, Robert A. George, said Entwistle might have had a better shot of being acquitted if he allowed his lawyers to mount an insanity defense.

"The crime itself is so horrendous that it immediately makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you think, 'The person who did this must be out of their minds,'" said George, whose recent clients include Christopher M. McCowen, the trash collector convicted in the November 2006 rape and murder of the fashion writer, Christa Worthington, on Cape Cod.

"Think of how the wind gets taken out of the prosecution's sails if you're admitting you committed the crime but you're not responsible because you weren't in your right mind."

But other lawyers said insanity defenses are seldom successful despite the public perception to the contrary.

Like every other conviction for first-degree murder in Massachusetts, yesterday's verdict is automatically appealed to the state Supreme Judicial Court. Denner said Entwistle's only plausible grounds for appeal concern the decision by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Diane M. Kottmyer to deny the request to move the trial.

Denner said he faced a similar media firestorm in his recent defense of Sheila LaBarre, who was convicted of killing her two boyfriends and scattering their remains on her farm.

"It's very hard to get an even playing field and fair trial in the context of that feeding frenzy," he said.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com