Testimony on doctor's sex life biased murder trial, court told
Dr. Dirk K. Greineder, the renowned Wellesley allergist convicted of brutally murdering his wife six years ago, asked the state's highest court yesterday to grant him a new trial, arguing that salacious testimony about his extramarital sex life prejudiced the jury.
At the high-profile trial in 2001, prosecutors argued that Greineder bludgeoned and cut the throat of Mabel Greineder by Morses Pond in Wellesley on Halloween in 1999 to keep hidden a secret life involving prostitutes, calls to phone sex lines, and trysts sought on the Internet.
Lawyers for Greineder, 64, filed a motion with the Supreme Judicial Court yesterday saying the information made it impossible for jurors to consider the case fairly.
''Evidence regarding Dr. Greineder's extramarital sexual activities had no proper place in this trial," his lead appellate lawyer, James L. Sultan, said in papers filed with the SJC. ''Nevertheless, the evidence came in, through witness after witness after witness, until the Commonwealth had achieved its actual objective of murdering the defendant's character in the eyes of the jury."
Greineder was one of the world's leading researchers on childhood asthma and was a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.
His six-week trial, with accounts of illicit sex and a family torn apart, capped one of highest-profile criminal cases in Greater Boston in recent years. Those components, plus accounts of the doctor's home life in upscale Wellesley, drew intensive media coverage, including daily reports by Court TV.
During a press conference outside Sultan's law office yesterday, Greineder's children, who supported him during the trial, reiterated that support for their father, who is serving a life sentence in MCI Shirley.
Greineder's daughter Britt said the case was a ''devastating tragedy for our family, but it was only compounded when we had to watch in horror as [the jury] unjustly incarcerated and convicted my dad."
''My father is not only incapable of harming anyone, he could never have taken our mother from us," she said.
Greineder's lawyers also argue in their motion that he was deprived of his constitutional right to effective legal representation. They contend that Greineder's defense lawyer at trial, Martin F. Murphy, failed to challenge shaky evidence presented by the state, including an analysis -- ''junk science," Sultan called it at the news conference -- that linked his DNA to bloody gloves and a knife used in the murder.
Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating, whose office prosecuted Greineder, said yesterday that he is confident Greineder got a fair trial, adding that Superior Court Judge Paul Chernoff limited evidence of the doctor's sexual activities to the week before his wife was killed. The doctor, according to evidence at trial, had a tryst with a prostitute during a business trip to New Jersey that week.
''We're confident that this motion will fail," Keating said.
Murphy said it would be unethical to comment about a pending motion of a former client.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Richard D. Grundy, argued that the doctor murdered his wife of 32 years to cover up behavior that threatened to break his family apart, including writing himself prescriptions for Viagra, seeking sex in online chat rooms, and setting up meetings with prostitutes at local hotels.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Greineder said his wife was killed by an unknown person after the two separated for 10 minutes while walking their German shepherd.
Greineder acknowledged what he called embarrassing forays into extramarital sex, but he denied murdering his 58-year-old wife and choked back tears as he called her ''the most wonderful person I ever met."
Greineder's lawyers argue that prosecutors drew an unfair connection between his infidelity and the murder.
''Dr. Greineder's character has been totally smeared, and it essentially distracted the jury from the real issue," Sultan said yesterday.
