Baye's attorneys have submitted a 64-page memorandum asking that evidence gathered during the police interview with Baye be excluded from trial.
Attorney David P. Hoose (left) stands with his client, Anthony P. Baye, during an appearance in Hampshire Superior Court.NORTHAMPTON – Brett Vottero, special prosecutor in the case against Anthony P. Baye, has filed his response contending why Judge Constance Sweeney should not suppress evidence in the case of Baye, who is charged in connection with 15 fires and the death of two men in Northampton in the early hours of Dec. 27, 2009.
Last week, Baye’s attorneys submitted a 64-page memorandum asking that evidence gathered during the Jan. 4 police interview with Baye be excluded from trial evidence, arguing that he was denied his right to a lawyer by the state police troopers who interrogated him.
In the interview, Baye can be seen admitting that he set some of the fires. Paul Yeskie and his son, Paul Yeskie Jr., died in one of those fires. Baye faces two counts of first-degree murder for their deaths in addition to many other charges stemming from the fires.
Although the memorandum does not raise new arguments, it outlines Baye’s case in detail, sometimes quoting minute by minute from the nearly 10-hour interview. It makes frequent reference to interviewing techniques used by trooper Michael Mazza and Sgt. Paul Zipper, saying the officers misled Baye by minimizing the fires, assuring him they would be treated as accidents if he admitted that he was “goofing off.”
In his eight-page response, Vottero contends that police who had already provided Miranda warnings at the outset of the interview do not need to repeat the warnings “whenever a defendant in an in interrogation moves toward inculpating himself.”
He also contends the defendant uses “every conceivable utterance that could be beneficial to his cause, he elides other information that would be detrimental to it.”
He said the defense “accurately excerpts what Sergeant Zipper said to a point, but he then leapfrogs two sentences in which the sergeant sought to clarify the defendant’s ambiguous reference to a lawyer.”
Vottero said that the tact would be admissible if the court had “to reconstruct the interview through oral recollections.” But he said there is a tape of the proceedings.
Sweeney has taken the case under advisement.