The Northwestern district attorney’s office hasn’t been willing to soften the charge against a Granby murder defendant, but it is now. Given the circumstances of the case, that makes sense.
When a third trial of Cara Rintala starts in September, her former wife, Annamarie Rintala, will have been dead for six years and five months. Their daughter was a toddler when one of her mothers was found strangled in the basement of their Granby home. She was 4 when her other mother was arrested 18 months later and charged with first-degree murder. Today this girl is halfway through elementary school.
It is time that responsibility for this killing be decided, one way or another.
Juries deadlocked in 2013 and 2014, resulting in mistrials. This month, the district attorney’s office asked a judge to consider instructing the third jury it can consider finding Cara Rintala guilty of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. That’s a significant adjustment, since prosecutors have felt they had a strong case – and a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court, in allowing a third trial, seemed to agree.
To the defense, it’s all been a circumstantial “house of cards.” It was defense counsel that first requested the lesser charge of manslaughter, rather than first-degree murder, at the time of the first trial, but was rebuffed by the DA’s office. Though prosecutors head into this third trial with additional evidence and testimony, they seem to be acknowledging the case they’ve presented twice has problems.
With manslaughter, they don’t have to convince jurors that Cara Rintala killed with premeditation. Punishments differ. While murder in Massachusetts carries a life sentence, the sentence for a conviction on voluntary manslaughter charge ranges from three to 20 years.
Cara Rintala’s lead defense attorney, David Hoose of Northampton, argued to Associate Justice Margot Botsford of the Supreme Judicial Court that trying his client a third time constituted double jeopardy. People are protected, in the U.S. justice system, from being charged with the same crime multiple times. Hoose also suggested that the state lacked evidence.
But in her May 2015 ruling, Botsford not only allowed this next trial, she went point by point through the case and found that the state had offered evidence “legally sufficient to warrant a conviction.” (Hoose took it to the full SJC this year, but lost his bid to prevent a third trial.)
The DA’s office had presented a possible motive for Cara Rintala to kill her spouse, Botsford observed, and shown that she had the opportunity to do so. Jurors were told of the “tumultuous relationship” between the Rintalas, their arrests for domestic violence and the fact that each had taken restraining orders out against the other. They heard of conflict over debts accumulated by Annamarie Rintala and about a relationship she’d pursued with a male co-worker.
Further, the timeline of the day of the killing – March 29, 2010 – didn’t provide a convincing alibi for the accused, Botsford wrote. Cara Rintala has maintained she was away from the couple’s Barton Street home from about 3 to 7 p.m. doing errands with their daughter and came home to find her wife dead. The two sides sparred in previous trials over what could have happened when, with the defense attacking a finding that the victim had been dead for six to eight hours at the time her body was discovered. The defense said that estimate was not based on a medical examiner’s evaluation but on comments from first-responders about the condition of her body.
However, Botsford wrote that a jury “reasonably could infer” that Annamarie Rintala was killed by her wife before the defendant says she left the house, citing the ME’s estimated time of death and the fact that the victim did not respond to a text she got at 1:53 p.m.
On top of that, Botsford, in her review of the two trials, found other evidence she deemed compelling. She noted testimony that the defendant, while out on those supposed errands, had discarded a rag with her wife’s blood on it. And she cited testimony by investigators that indicated the crime scene had been “staged” to suggest a break-in.
The DA’s office is expected to present new experts on that question. It’s a fair guess that their presence will attempt to address reservations held by earlier jurors. The defense will continue to characterize the case as circumstantial.
In two months, citizens of the region will be called to perform the solemn duty of sitting on a jury. After two mistrials, this could well be the last time prosecutors attempt to make a case against Cara Rintala. If the presiding judge decides jurors can consider a finding of manslaughter, that would provide new latitude for their deliberations.
Whatever they decide, it will have been a long and twisting path to justice.