Cara Rintala will face fourth murder trial in Northampton next year

NORTHAMPTON — Upcoming slide, Cara Rintala will go on demo for the fourth time for the alleged murder of her spouse, Annamarie Cochrane Rintala, in their Granby dwelling in 2011.

On Friday morning, Hampshire Superior Court docket Choose Richard Carey stated the demo will begin with jury collection on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Rintala, now a resident of Rhode Island under GPS supervision, was in the courtroom.

To start with Assistant District Legal professional Steven Gagne reached agreements with Rintala’s defense attorneys — Chauncey Wood and Rosemary Scapicchio — about turning around evidentiary information and the two sides set a pretrial standing meeting for Nov. 30.

“I don’t believe attempting this case later this 12 months was at any time genuinely reasonable,” Gagne stated in court, including that Scapicchio has other trials subsequent spring and that it would be complicated to gather dozens of witnesses throughout the summer time.

Wood is Rintala’s appellate lawyer and claimed previous yr he does not prepare to be involved in the subsequent trial, which prosecutors said is expected to very last 3 to 4 weeks.

“Murder cases are the most significant scenarios this workplace handles,” Gagne reported immediately after Friday’s courtroom session. “We imagine pretty strongly in our scenario and we are committed to getting justice for the target and her family members.”

Annamarie Cochrane Rintala, 37, was observed beaten and strangled in the couple’s basement on March 29, 2010. When to start with responders arrived, Rintala was cradling her wife’s entire body, which was described as chilly and protected in paint.

Rintala’s initially two trials, in 2013 and 2014, finished in hung juries and she was introduced on $150,000 bail in March 2014. At the third demo, in Oct 2016, Rintala was convicted and sentenced to everyday living in prison without having the risk of parole.

That conviction was overturned final September when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that specific testimony was prejudicial and ought to not have been authorized.

“The Commonwealth argued that the defendant engaged in a plan created to cover up her involvement in the murder by driving close to all afternoon, disposing of evidence, and making an attempt to talk with the victim to exhibit that she believed the sufferer was alive at the time of the phone calls,” according to the significant court’s ruling. “The defendant then deliberately poured the paint on the system and lifted the system onto herself right before the police arrived to make the crime much more complicated to investigate.”

David Guilianelli, a quality engineer for the paint producer, testified that the paint was deliberately poured and not spilled, and that it was poured within just 4 several hours of the time that initially responders took photos of the scene.

The court identified that Guilianelli “lacked the important expertise” to provide these kinds of testimony and that the information “likely swayed the jury’s verdict.”

In a assertion about the situation heritage, the Northwestern district attorney’s place of work observed, “The SJC also dominated that the Commonwealth experienced introduced more than enough proof in the trial to assist a conviction.”

Rintala has been free of charge on $50,000 dollars bail given that November and the court docket allowed her to move in with her relatives in Narragansett, R.I., pending the new demo. Considering that her incarceration, Rintala’s mother and father experienced been elevating the now-teenage daughter she shared with Cochrane Rintala.

On Friday, Judge Carey allowed a defense motion for Rintala to go on holiday vacation in Provincetown with her daughter for many times following month and extended her 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. curfew by a single hour each night. Prosecutors did not item.

Brian Steele can be arrived at at [email protected].