George Gould was free for just over a year after a judge determined he was wrongly convicted of murder, but he is back to prison and will not be retried, the Hartford Courant reports.
A judge from Rockville Superior Court issued the decision on Tuesday, according to the Courant, and found that Gould's defense could not prove that he was "actually innocent" of the murder of a New Haven bodega owner, in 1993.
In 2010, a judge ordered that Gould and Ronald Taylor be released after serving 16 years of an 80-year sentence for the murder of Eugenio Deleon Vega. Taylor died in October 2011 after being diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer.
The state Supreme Court had ruled that the lower court judge was wrong to release the men and reinstated their sentences. The justices determined that the lower judge’s ruling was wrong because there wasn't any evidence of the men's innocence and ordered new trials for the two men, related to their habeas corpus appeals that the lower court decided in their favor.
The main issue in the case was the testimony of the prosecution's main witness, Doreen Stiles, at the original trial. Stiles testified that she saw Gould enter Deleon's store and heard him arguing with Deleon about opening his safe, then heard a gunshot and saw Gould and Taylor leaving the store. A jury convicted Gould and Taylor in 1995.
But Stiles testified before the lower court judge in 2009 that she lied during the trial and wasn't at the murder scene. She said that she was "dopesick" when police interrogated her after the killing and that a detective told her he would help her buy heroin if she told authorities what happened. Stiles said she identified Taylor and Gould in photos as the men in Deleon's shop and afterward two detectives gave her $60 and drove her to a street where she bought heroin.
Police denied Stiles' allegations.
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Gould's attorney, Joseph Visone, had argued that the state's theory that Gould and Taylor killed Deleon in a robbery made no sense. He said Deleon was found with $1,800 stuffed in his pockets and there was $100 in the cash register, money that should have been taken if the motive was robbery. Both Visone and Tsimbidaros claimed Deleon's son was the killer, an allegation O'Hare has called "vague speculation.
The judge this week determined that the testimony given in the original trial was credible, the Courant reports.
