PROVIDENCE Xavier Vidot was 17 when authorities alleged he shot his mother’s boyfriend to death at the home they shared on Edgewood Avenue in Cranston.
When Vidot was 19, a Superior Court judge sentenced him to serve 24 years, plus a consecutive life term, in prison for second-degree murder in the killing of aspiring rapper Valdez Loiseau.
A lawyer for Vidot on Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to overturn that conviction, arguing that the prosecutor impermissibly introduced expert evidence about gunplay in closing arguments as well as purported testimony from a witness who was never called to the stand.
“There is a man’s life hanging in the balance,” Ferenc Karoly said.
He testified that the officer connected with a knee and took a blow to his face, but he shied away from detailing the exchange blow by blow. I m not watching the guy s movements, Mattiello said. I m in the fight. You know. I shouldn t have to go through that.
Mattiello was the first witness in the case, taking questions from Assistant Attorney General Daniel Guglielmo before Magistrate Judge J. Patrick O Neill.
He had been arrested in the wake of a domestic incident involving his brother. He was accused of assaulting his brother with a piece of aluminum. Taken into custody by Leonard and Officer Zachary Burns, he faced a charge of felony assault.
New team built from the ground up by the Attorney General will focus on civil-rights violations in Rhode Island Tom Mooney, The Providence Journal
PROVIDENCE In a divisive year that has seen more hate crimes and racially charged incidents of excessive force by police sparking demonstrations nationwide Rhode Island’s attorney general is giving renewed priority to civil-rights abuses.
Attorney General Peter F. Neronha has created a special four-member team of investigators to handle all civil-rights complaints that reach his office.
Previously such cases could have been handled by any of the office’s dozens of prosecutors, or often at the local community level by a city or town solicitor.