NORTHAMPTON — A Superior Court judge has denied Cara Rintala’s bid to have her murder case dismissed, saying the Supreme Judicial Court has twice considered and rejected the same arguments advanced by the defense at a court hearing last week.
The fourth trial for Rintala, accused of killing her wife more than 13 years ago, is set to begin next month.
Defense attorney Chauncey Wood argued before Judge Francis Flannery at the Aug. 16 hearing that prosecutors cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his client beat and strangled Annamarie Cochrane Rintala to death in their Granby home on March 29, 2010, without relying on speculation.
“Yet, 13 years and three trials later, it’s what they have relied on, and it’s what they will have to rely on,” Wood said.
In its motion, the defense argued that Flannery should conclude that the SJC erred in 2021 when it sent the case back to Superior Court for a fourth trial.
But, in a seven-page ruling Wednesday, Flannery noted that the defense had twice argued to the SJC that the evidence against Rintala was insufficient for conviction, and that another trial would constitute double jeopardy, or being tried twice for the same crime.
Quoting the SJC’s ruling in its denial of the defense motion following the second mistrial in the case, in 2014, Flannery wrote, “Because the evidence was sufficient to warrant a conviction, Rintala may be retried without violating her rights against being subjected to doubly jeopardy.”
“Nothing material about the case or the law has changed since (the SJC’s previous rulings in the case),” Flannery wrote. “The defendant advances essentially the same arguments as in those appeals … The SJC has already, on two occasions, considered these arguments and concluded both that a rational trier of fact could find the defendant guilty on the evidence set fort above, and that there is no double jeopardy violation.”
After juries deadlocked at her first two trials, Rintala, now 56, was found guilty at her third trial in 2016 and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The guilty verdict was overturned in September 2021 by the Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled that the commonwealth’s paint expert “lacked the necessary expertise” and that his testimony — that Rintala had poured paint over the crime scene within four hours of the time emergency responders took photos — “likely swayed the jury’s verdict.”
Rintala’s fourth trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 6 with jury selection. She has been free on $50,000 cash bail since November 2021 and the court allowed her to move in with her family in Narragansett, Rhode Island, pending the new trial. Since her incarceration, Rintala’s parents had been raising Brianna, the now-teenage daughter she shared with Cochrane Rintala.