Testimony that two men besides Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel were involved in the grisly murder of Martha Moxley is "pretty compelling," a Connecticut Supreme Court justice said Thursday.
Thursday, Skakel’s attorneys asked the Connecticut Supreme Court to throw out his murder conviction. Skakel's appeal is banking on videotaped testimony by former classmate Gitano "Tony" Bryant.
In 2003, the year after Skakel was convicted, Bryant implicated two other men in Moxley's 1975 death. Bryant and Skakel attended the same private school as children. In his statement to an investigator Skakel hired, Bryant said his two friends were in Greenwich the night Moxley was killed and they told him they got Moxley "caveman style."
Prosecutors say Bryant is lying and that nobody saw him and his friends in the upper class, predominantly white, gated neighborhood the night of the murder.
Bryant and one of the men he implicated are black; the other has been described as mixed race.
On Thursday, Justice Richard N. Palmer pressed prosecutors about why they didn't grant Bryant immunity.
"It's pretty compelling, I think," Palmer said
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"The state is not in the habit of granting immunity to people whose credibility we think is worthless," prosecutor Susann Gill said.
Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for fatally beating Moxley with a golf club when they were 15.
Since making the statement, Bryant has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The two men he implicated have done the same.
