Jury Deadlocks in the Double Murder Trial of Sean Fitzpatrick

Sean Fitzpatrick sits while he awaits the jury's verdict in a Massachusetts courtroom. The jury reported it had come to an impasse four days into deliberations.


WOBURN, Massachusetts---Late Tuesday, August 26th, after enduring four days of deliberation and exhausting all other measures including the "DYNAMITE" charge, Judge Kathe Tuttman dismissed the four men-eight women jury and declared a mistrial in the highly publicized double murder-love triangle case of Sean Fitzpatrick. The jury had sent one final note earlier in the day that said:

“Some members have expressed conviction they could never vote guilty in the absence of physical evidence.”

Fitzpatrick, 44, is accused of driving from his home in Freedom, New Hampshire to Wakefield, Massachusetts on March 13, 2006 to murder Michael Zammitti. It is the Prosecution's theory that Zammitti, 39, was killed because he was the husband of Fitzpatrick's paramour. Chester Roberts, 51, was killed because he had witnessed the murder. Sean Fitzpatrick has vehemently denied any involvement in the murders and took the stand in his own defense during the trial.

Michelle Zammitti testified that she had expressed to the Defendant that their relationship was over and that "the only way they could be together would be if something happened to her husband." Although, she exclaimed this to the Prosecution two weeks before trial and two years after the fact.

During the trial, there was much suspicion and a lot of circumstantial evidence, but the one thing missing was the fact that the Commonwealth could not put the Defendant in his neighbor's truck and put that truck at the Allstate company in Wakefield, Massachusetts the morning of the murders beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the evidence made one have to assume that it was the Defendant who was driving his neighbor's truck and that that was the truck used to commit the murders, but no definitive evidence existed.

The Commonwealth has already said it will retry Mr. Fitzpatrick some time in October. Until then, the Defendant must sit in prison where he has sat for two years as he awaits the legal outcome of this sordid case of an adulterous affair gone awry. My questions to anyone who reads this are simple:

Should he be given bail now that the first jury has hung? What, if anything, should the Prosecution do to buttress its evidence against the Defendant? Were you convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Fitzpatrick had committed these brutal murders?

If you have not heard of the case, you can search "Sean Fitzpatrick murder trial" on Google or CNN.com/CRIME.

I, for one, was not convinced that Mr. Fitzpatrick had committed these crimes. I watched this trial for three weeks on CourtTV and the Prosecutor's evidence was based on assumptions---not facts. You had to assume that the truck on the video was Sean's neighbor's truck, you had to assume that Sean Fitzpatrick had stolen it and was driving it, you had to assume the shotgun stolen from the Zammitti's house was the one used in the murders, you had to assume that the Defendant had burglarized the Zammitti's house to get that shotgun, and you had to assume that the Defendant had never been in his neighbor's truck at least one time in all of the years his neighbor had owned it.

It was all assumptions. In a murder trial, wherein a Defendant is innocent until proven guilty, you cannot assume anything. You must reach a verdict on what can be proven---not what can be assumed. In this country, if an assumption were evidence, every Defendant would be convicted, which is all well and good until it's your son or your brother or even you who are on trial. Then you will want a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. Assumptions destroy that presumption of innocence, and, in this country, that, my friends, is no fair trial.