BOSTON-
The state’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a judge’s decision to grant a new trial to a former Harvard graduate student who was convicted of stabbing a teenage cook to death during a street fight in Cambridge.
The Supreme Judicial Court found that Superior Court Judge Regina Quinlan was correct when she overturned the manslaughter conviction of Alexander Pring-Wilson in the 2003 death of 18-year-old Michael Colono.
During his 2004 trial, Pring-Wilson, 29, testified that he stabbed Colono in self-defense after Colono and his cousin, Samuel Rodriguez, beat him relentlessly on a Cambridge street on April 12, 2003. Rodriguez and his girlfriend testified Pring-Wilson was the aggressor, stabbing Colono after he ridiculed the Harvard student as he stumbled drunkenly along the street.
Quinlan, who presided at Pring-Wilson’s trial, overturned her conviction eight months later, applying an Supreme Judicial Court ruling that said juries should be told about a victim’s violent history if it sheds light on a self-defense claim.
Quinlan said the jury should have been told about violent episodes in Colono’s past, even though the Supreme Judicial Court did not issue its ruling until five months after Pring-Wilson’s trial.
Prosecutors appealed, arguing the Supreme Judicial Court ruling should not apply retroactively to Pring-Wilson’s case. They also said the jury heard about Colono’s reputation as hot-tempered, but still convicted Pring-Wilson.
The Supreme Judicial Court found on Tuesday that the new law applied to Pring-Wilson’s case and said Quinlan had not abused her discretion by granting him a new trial “where the defendant had persistently attempted to introduce evidence of Colono and Rodriguez’s violent histories to support the central issue at trial—whether he had acted in self-defense.”
Pring-Wilson, who is originally from Colorado Springs, Colo., was charged with first-degree murder, but the jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to six to eight years in prison, but has been free on $400,000 bail awaiting a new trial.
Charles Rankin, one of Pring-Wilson’s attorneys, said he hoped prosecutors would decide that going forward with a second trial “would be an exercise in futility,” now that the Supreme Judicial Court has upheld the right of Pring-Wilson’s defense to tell the jury about violent episodes in the pasts of both Colono and Rodriguez.
“Our hope is that this will be the end of the matter in light of all the evidence that could come in,” Rankin said.
But Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone said he fully intended to retry Pring-Wilson.
“We will again present the strong evidence that led a jury to convict Pring-Wilson for drawing his knife and killing the unarmed victim, Michael Colono—stabbing him five times in seventy seconds,” Leone said in a statement.
When Pring-Wilson was convicted, a criminal defendant who was claiming self-defense was allowed to tell the jury about a victim’s violent past only if the defendant knew about that violent propensity before the fight.
In its ruling five months after Pring-Wilson’s conviction, the Supreme Judicial Court said judges could allow a defendant to introduce evidence about the violent tendencies of a victim even if he or she did not know about it before the confrontation.
Pring-Wilson and Colono did not know each other before their fight.
Defense lawyers had sought to introduce evidence of Colono’s criminal record, including charges of drug possession and malicious destruction of property for an incident in which he kicked and broke a glass door at a restaurant. Rodriguez had been convicted three times for assault and battery.
The case highlighted tensions between Ivy Leaguers and working-class Cambridge residents.
At the time of the slaying, Pring-Wilson was studying for his master’s degree in Russian and Eurasian studies at Harvard. Colono, a high school dropout with a 2-year-old daughter, had earned his equivalency diploma and was working as a cook at a Boston hotel.
