The highest court in Massachusetts refused Friday to order new trial for a sex offender convicted of fatally stabbing a 30-year-old sailing instructor in the bathroom of a highway rest stop.
Alexandra Zapp's July 2002 murder inspired a new law designed to make it easier to keep sex offenders behind bars.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded that Paul Leahy, who had served a 13-year prison sentence for rape in the 1980s, got a fair trial before he was convicted of first-degree murder in Zapp's killing.
"This was a brutal crime inflicted on an innocent young woman with no mitigating circumstances," Justice Robert Cordy wrote in the court's 30-page ruling.
Zapp, a sailing instructor and charity fundraiser from Newport, had stopped at a rest area along Route 24 in Bridgewater on her way home from a Boston Harbor cruise.
Leahy, a cook at the rest stop's Burger King, accosted Zapp before she could leave the women's bathroom and stabbed her 26 times. When a state police lieutenant heard Zapp's muffled screams and entered the bathroom, Leahy allegedly told him, "I lost it. I lost it."
Leahy claimed his confession to police should have been thrown out. He also argued that the judge who presided over his trial should have excluded jurors who had been exposed to media coverage of the murder.
But the SJC concluded that Leahy was advised of his Miranda rights four times and voluntarily waived them before he confessed. The court also didn't find any evidence that the jury was tainted by media coverage.
"The judge conscientiously distinguished between persons that he believed could be impartial despite exposure to media coverage and persons that he did not believe could be impartial," Cordy wrote.
Nearly two years after Zapp's murder, Gov. Mitt Romney signed into law a bill that expanded the list of crimes that would allow the state to civilly commit criminals after they finish serving prison sentences. The law's advocates said it closed a loophole that prevented prosecutors from having Leahy committed as a habitual sex offender.
Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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