Wealthy Glastonbury businessman and New London-Waterford Speedbowl owner Bruce J. Bemer wasn't proven guilty of the human-trafficking crimes of which a Danbury Superior Court jury convicted him in 2019, a unanimous state Supreme Court held in a decision released late Wednesday afternoon.

Unlike many appellate decisions reversing criminal convictions, the decision in the Bemer case leaves prosecutors no option to retry him, meaning that his criminal case is effectively over.

The jury convicted Bemer, now 67, of four counts of patronizing a prostitute who was a victim of human trafficking and a single count of intentionally aiding Robert King of Danbury in trafficking the men Bemer paid for sex.

Judge Robin Pavia subsequently sentenced Bemer to 10 years in prison for the five felonies. But Bemer, who had been free on $1 million bond until the sentencing, posted a $750,000 appeal bond almost immediately afterward and has remained free while the case was on appeal.

Bemer's legal team in the appeal was led by Hartford lawyers Brendon P. Levesque and Wesley W. Horton and included Manchester law partners Anthony Spinella and Ryan Barry, who have represented him throughout the complex criminal and civil cases stemming from his sexual practices.

The defense lawyers raised a thorny legal issue about whether the prosecution at Bemer's trial had proven that human trafficking occurred under the law that existed at the time.

But the Supreme Court avoided that issue in its decision, assuming that King was guilty of human trafficking.

King was convicted of conspiracy to commit human trafficking in a 2019 plea bargain and received a 4 [1/2] -year prison sentence.

The state's top court focused instead on whether trial prosecutor Sharmese L. Hodge, who has since been named Hartford state's attorney, presented sufficient evidence to prove that Bemer knew of the trafficking and intentionally aided King in committing it. The court found that evidence wanting.

The prosecution team in the appeal, led by James A. Killen, argued that Bemer must have known about the trafficking for several reasons, including that he had known King for 20 to 25 years, during which King had frequently supplied him with men for sex.

The Supreme Court agreed that this raised "suspicion" that Bemer may have known about King's recruitment tactics.

"But the correlation between the length of time that the defendant paid for these men and any knowledge on the defendant's part of King's method for inducing the men to engage in prostitution is weak," Justice Raheem L. Mullins wrote for the court.

"Indeed, there was no evidence that, during the years that King arranged men for the defendant, the defendant ever witnessed any of King's recruitment tactics or was told by any of the individuals that they felt forced, coerced or defrauded into engaging in sexual conduct," Mullins explained.

"To the contrary, the evidence demonstrated that the defendant had little to no dialogue with the men and that the liaisons were short and did not include socializing, only allowing time for the sexual conduct," he wrote.

Hodge didn't call King as a witness at Bemer's trial after serial killer William Devin Howell quoted King saying during a jailhouse conversation that he would lie to get out of jail. Mullins wrote in the Supreme Court decision that there was no evidence that King ever revealed his recruitment tactics to Bemer.

In addition to the criminal case, Bemer has faced numerous civil lawsuits from men who say he exploited them sexually, sometimes when they were underage. Bemer has settled a number of those suits, usually on undisclosed terms.