NORTHAMPTON — Jurors in the Cara Rintala trial went home at the end of the day Friday, their third day of deliberations, without reaching a verdict in the Granby murder case.
Hampshire Superior Court Judge Francis Flannery released the 12 jurors and four alternates for the weekend, instructing them, as he has throughout the 10-day trial, to have no discussion about the case with anyone, even each other, to have no contact with anyone involved with the case, to do no research on it and to shield themselves from all news media accounts of the proceedings.
Flannery revealed that he had received a note from jurors just before releasing them for the day, but would not address it until Monday morning.
Outside the courtroom, First Assistant District Attorney Steve Gagne said he would have been surprised if jurors had reached a verdict so soon after the end of the trial, though he conceded he was secretly hoping they would. Juries in Rintala’s three previous trials have taken four or five days before reaching a verdict or declaring they were deadlocked, as they were in the first two trials in 2013 and 2014, he said.
Rintala, 56, is charged with strangling her wife, Annamarie Cochrane Rintala, at their Granby home on March 29, 2010. After two hung juries, she was convicted in 2016 and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In September 2021, the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial, saying testimony by the commonwealth’s paint expert was not reliable and may have swayed the jury.