AA Sponsor Michael Skakel Wants Reduction In His Sentence For Martha Moxley Murder

michael Skakel is wanting the court to reduce his 20 year sentence, in part because he has helped a lot of people in Alcoholics Anonymous. Talk about AA being a ‘get out of jail card’, they were not kidding!

Michael Skakel joined AA when he was around 20 years old and had been an AA sponsor for along time. He even worked for AA as well. After killing Martha Moxley at the age of 15 with a golf club, he grew up to be An Alcoholics Anonymous Leader.

Here is an except from original trial- 2002

‘During two days of testimony last week, Dennis heard from two men who said Skakel in 1978 separately told them he murdered Moxley while attending the Elan School rehab center in Maine. The judge also heard evidence from Skakel’s childhood best friend, Andrew Pugh, who testified that years after the murder Skakel confided to being at the crime scene the night Moxley was slain with a golf club owned by the Skakel family.

Pugh testified that after a chance encounter at a 1991 Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Greenwich, Skakel told him he had climbed the tree under which Moxley’s body was found, and that he masturbated in the tree. One of the prosecution’s former Elan School residents, Gregory Coleman, testified Skakel confided he “drove in (Moxley’s) skull” with a golf club and later returned to the body to masturbate over it. Coleman also testified Skakel bragged he would get away with the crime because “he was related to the Kennedy family.” ‘

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel plans to seek a reduction in his sentence of 20 years to life in prison for the killing of his neighbor when they were teenagers in 1975.

Skakel, a nephew of Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, is scheduled to appear Tuesday before a three-judge panel in Middletown that reviews sentences.
Skakel was sentenced in 2002 after he was convicted of bludgeoning 15-year-old Martha Moxley to death with a golf club in wealthy Greenwich. Moxley’s brother and mother are expected to attend the hearing.Prosecutor Susann Gill said she would argue the sentence was appropriate.Skakel’s attorney, Hope Seeley, said she would focus on the fact he was only 15 at the time of the crime. She said he has helped a lot of people through Alcoholics Anonymous and the life he has lived shows the public doesn’t need to be protected from him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/kennedy-cousin-michael-skakel-seeks-reduction-in-20-year-sentence-for-connecticut-murder/2012/01/23/gIQArIHqLQ_story.html

Cocaine Anonymous Treasurer Sentenced To Death In Petit Connecticut Murders

Condemned: Joshua Komisarjevsky was sentenced to death today for the brutal murder and rape of a wife and her daughters in Connecticut

Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky first crossed paths at a Hartford, Connecticut, drug treatment center in the summer of 2006, according to police.

Both men, career criminals, had been in and out of jail for similar non-violent crimes. Twice they had overlapping stays at the same halfway house or drug center, and the two attended Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings together and became friends, according to a detective’s report. NA Daytona Meetings in Holly Hill Florida.

They shared similar interests — often the downfall that led them into the criminal justice system — but nobody knew at the time that their friendship would result in what police and prosecutors say was one of the most brutal crimes in memory in the prosperous town of Cheshire, Connecticut.

Connecticut killer sentenced to die for “unimaginable horror”

Mary Ellen GodinReuters2:14 p.m. CST, January 27, 2012
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (Reuters) – A judge ordered Joshua Komisarjevsky to be executed this summer for the 2007 murders of a mother and her two daughters during a brutal home invasion in Connecticut, saying on Friday that he committed a crime of “unimaginable horror.”Judge Jon Blue told Komisarjevsky, 31, that he alone was to blame for his new address on death row after the triple murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Hayley Petit, 17, and Michaela Petit, 11, and beating of husband and father Dr. William Petit Jr.”This is a terrible sentence but one you have written for yourself,” Blue told Komisarjevsky in New Haven Superior Court.”Your crime was one of unimaginable horror and sadness,” the judge said. “Your fate is now in the hands of others. May God have mercy on your soul.”He set an execution date of July 20 pending an appeal, which could drag out the matter for years.Before the judge spoke, Komisarjevsky, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, denied he killed or raped anyone and blamed “the hurt I caused” on being a victim himself of sex abuse as a child, drug addiction, and his accomplice Steven Hayes, 48, already sentenced to death row.Hawke-Petit was strangled and the girls died of smoke inhalation after the home was set afire. Hawke-Petit was raped and Michaela Petit was sexually assaulted.Dr. Petit, who had been tied up and beaten unconscious, escaped as the home went up in flames.http://www.wqad.com/topic/sns-rt-us-crime-homeinvasiontre80q1iy-20120127,0,2603124.story

New Haven, Connecticut (CNN) — A judge in New Haven sentenced a 31-year-old man to death Friday for his role in a deadly home invasion that killed a woman and her two daughters in 2007.

Jurors convicted Joshua Komisarjevsky in October on six capital felony charges. The 12-member jury had recommended death by lethal injection on each of the counts.

“The task of sentencing another human being to death is the most sober and somber experience a judge can have,” said Superior Court Judge Jon Blue.

Komisarjevsky responded Friday, saying that he “came into this trial angry and defiant.”

It’s a “surreal experience to be condemned to die,” he said. “Our apathetic pursuits trampled the innocent.”

He said, “I did not rape. I did not pour that gas or light that fire.”

“I will never find peace again and my soul is torn,” Komisarjevsky added.

The family of his victims left the courtroom before Komisarjevsky spoke.

Richard Hawke, in a victim’s statement prior to the sentencing, said the killings of his daughter and granddaughters had left him “half-past dead.”

“They offered to give you everything you asked for, you didn’t have to take their lives,” he told Komisarjevsky. “You will from now on be known as a prison number in the book of death. You are now in God’s hands.”

The man convicted of being Komisarjevsky’s accomplice, Steven Hayes, was sentenced to death in 2010. Juries convicted the pair on charges that they beat and tied up Dr. William Petit Jr., raped and strangled his wife, molested one of their daughters and set the house on fire before trying to flee.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/27/justice/connecticut-home-invasion-sentencing/index.html?iref=allsearch

Photos of Petit Crime Scene-

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/slideshow/evidence-photos-petit-murder-trial-11658978

July 18th 2013 Katie Couric Show with Mathew West and the Cheshire Murders-

http://www.katiecouric.com/on-the-show/2013/07/18/cheshire-murders-matthew-west/