State Supreme Court to take up Leniart murder appeal
The state Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case of George M. Leniart, whose conviction for the 1996 murder of Montville teenager April Dawn Pennington was overturned by the Appellate Court in June.
A clerk confirmed Friday that the high court on Oct. 4 granted a writ of certiorari, or agreed to re-examine the lower court's decision.
New London Superior Court prosecutor Stephen M. Carney, who tried the case with now-retired prosecutor John P. Gravalec-Pannone, said he would be writing and arguing the appeal.
Lauren Weisfeld, chief of legal services for the Office of the Public Defender, had represented Leniart in the lower court appeal. She could not immediately be reached for comment.
Leniart, 50, is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, having been convicted at trial of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering the 15-year-old Pennington even though her body was never recovered.
A convicted sex offender from Uncasville, he was identified as a suspect in the early years of the investigation, but the case went unsolved for 15 years until the state police Eastern District Major Crime Squad obtained a warrant for his arrest.
A jury convicted him in 2010, but in June 2016, the Appellate Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial for Leniart. The appellate judges wrote that the trial judge, Barbara Bailey Jongbloed, should have allowed the defense to introduce a videotape interview of a key witness — Patrick J. Allain — and improperly excluded defense testimony from an expert on the reliability of jailhouse informant testimony.
The high court has agreed to address those issues and to re-examine the so-called "corpus delecti" issue, or the lack of a body to prove that the crime occurred, according to Carney. State troopers searched wells, wooded areas and waterways and put cadaver dogs on the trail, but never recovered the teen's body.
Allain, a classmate of Pennington, had offered chilling testimony at the trial that he and Leniart had sexually assaulted the teen in Leniart's pickup truck after Pennington sneaked out of her parents' home.
Allain testified that when Leniart dropped him off at home, the girl was still in the truck. He said Leniart told him the next day that he had killed April and disposed of her body.
