The Connecticut Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the appeal of a murder convict who said the jury in his case was tainted by testimony from a witness who said God helped identify him in a photograph array.
In a 7-0 ruling, justices upheld the conviction of Pedro Miranda, who is serving life in prison for the 1987 killing of 13-year-old Mayra Cruz.
Mayra disappeared while walking to school in Hartford, Connecticut, and her body was found in East Windsor near Miranda’s former employer.
Miranda is also serving a second life sentence in the killing of 17-year-old Carmen Lopez, of Hartford, in 1988.
An innocent man served more than two decades behind bars for that killing before being freed as a result of new DNA testing.
Miranda was also charged with killing a third Hartford teenager, Rosa Valentin, in 1986, but prosecutors declined to try him because of problems with evidence.
Miranda has denied any role in the killings.
A witness, Jose Diaz, told police he saw Mayra get into a yellow Datsun on the day she disappeared, but he could not see the driver’s face.
Police said Diaz identified Miranda, who drove a yellow Datsun, in a photograph array.
During the trial, Diaz testified that when police showed him photographs of possible suspects he asked God for help.
“When I looked at the pictures, my eyesight was brought to this one picture and I started crying and the officer asked me what was going [on], and I told him I asked God for direction,” Diaz said. “And I pointed to picture number [five].”
Miranda’s trial attorneys objected to the testimony.
Judge Trial referee John Mulcahy ordered the jury to leave the courtroom and sustained the objection, but Mulcahy did not tell jurors when they returned to disregard what Diaz said or that he had sustained the objection.
After testimony in the trial was complete, Mulcahy instructed jurors to disregard what Diaz had said after Miranda’s lawyers objected, but not before the objection.
The Supreme Court said it upheld Miranda’s conviction because his lawyers failed to ask the judge to tell the jury the objection was sustained and to disregard his testimony in the days after the objection.
Miranda agreed to the language in the jury instructions, it added.
Miranda was charged with the three killings in 2008 after new DNA tests in the Lopez case linked him to her killing and exonerated her boyfriend, Miguel Roman, who served 20 years in prison before being freed with the help of the Connecticut Innocence Project.
State officials awarded Roman US$6 million for his wrongful conviction.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion