Lugo Murder Conviction Upheld

By Connecticut Supreme Court

By Andrew Gorosko

The Connecticut Supreme Court this week upheld the murder conviction of Ruperto Lugo, 23, of Stratford, who is serving a 50-year prison sentence for the July 1999 Sandy Hook street corner shooting death of 15-year-old Jason Gowdy.

In a 3-to-2 decision, the court denied Lugo’s appeal, affirming his April 2001 murder conviction, which was rendered by a 12-member jury in Danbury Superior Court. Through the appeal, Lugo had sought to get another trial.

Attorney Suzanne Zitser, the public defender who represented Lugo in his appeal before the Supreme Court, said December 2 that she will request that the full seven-member court rehear oral arguments in the Lugo appeal. A five-member panel of the court heard oral arguments in the case last January 15.

“The dissent says it all, as far as I’m concerned,” Ms Zitser said, noting that two of the five Supreme Court justices who voted on the appeal dissented from the majority opinion. Ms Zitser said she wants the full court “to take another look at the case.”

Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Devin Stilson, who prosecuted the murder case for the state in 2001, had no comment on the Supreme Court ruling.

Attorney Nancy Chupak, who represented the state in Lugo’s appeal, could not be reached for comment.

On December 2, David Gowdy, the father of Jason Gowdy, reacted to the court’s decision saying, “I’m just glad. I don’t think I could make [it through] another trial…I don’t want to go through that again…I really don’t.”

Mr Gowdy said that he is just getting to the point where he can talk about his son’s death without sobbing. Jason Gowdy of Sandy Hook was a student at Henry Abbott Regional Technical School in Danbury.

Mille Gowdy, the mother of Jason Gowdy, said of her son’s death, “It is so painful.” After the Supreme Court decision, she said, “I was thrilled. I was so happy… knowing that [the appeal] got denied.

“I don’t want it to be opened up again,” she said, adding that she hopes the criminal case ends with the Supreme Court’s latest decision.

In May 2001, Danbury Superior Court Judge Gary White ordered Lugo to serve 50 years in prison, and an additional ten years of heavily monitored special parole. The judge ordered that the felony murder prison term begin following Lugo’s July 2002 completion of a three-year prison term, for assault on a correction officer.

Lugo was convicted on four charges: felony murder, attempted first-degree robbery, carrying a pistol without a permit, and possession of a weapon in a motor vehicle. Lugo was acquitted on a charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree robbery. Lugo is incarcerated at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield.

Judge White sentenced co-defendant Alejandro Melendez, who is now 24, of Bridgeport to a sentence of ten years. That sentence includes eight years in prison, followed by two years of heavily monitored special parole, based on convictions on two weapons charges in connection with the Gowdy murder. Melendez, who was charged as an accessory in the case, supplied Lugo with the gun and ammunition that Lugo used to kill Gowdy. Melendez is incarcerated at Gates Correctional Institution in Niantic.

Both defendants were 19 at the time of the crime.

In testimony during the murder trial, Lugo acknowledged that he had shot Gowdy, but said that he did not intentionally shoot him. After Lugo pulled a pistol on Jason Gowdy, a scuffle followed in which Gowdy sought to disarm Lugo, but the gun discharged, sending two bullets from the .380 semiautomatic pistol into Gowdy’s head at close range, killing him on a July night on the corner of Riverside Road and Cherry Street in Sandy Hook.

In his Connecticut Supreme Court appeal, Lugo had maintained that the trial court in Danbury had improperly restricted the scope of questioning at the trial, had excluded relevant evidence regarding his state of mind at the time of the crime, and had restricted his lawyer’s cross-examination of a witness for the state.

“We reject each of these claims and, therefore, affirm the judgment of the trial court,” the court wrote in its majority opinion. Voting in the majority were Chief Justice William J. Sullivan, Justice Peter T. Zarella, and Justice Christine S. Vertefeuille.

 Dissenting from the majority opinion were Justice David M. Borden and Justice Richard N. Palmer. In their dissent, the two justices found that the trial court abused its discretion by restricting the questions that Lugo’s lawyer was allowed to ask at the trial.