VIA THE BOSTON GLOBE

In wake of his death, Aaron Hernandez’s murder conviction will be VOIDED

The chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association tells the Boston Globe that Aaron Hernandez’s murder conviction over the 2014 shooting death of Odin Lloyd will be voided after the former New England Patriots star was found dead in his prison cell early Wednesday morning.

Hernandez was in the process of appealing his conviction at the time of his death. Because of a long-standing legal principle called “abatement ab initio” — meaning “from the beginning” — a person’s case reverts to its status at the beginning if they die before their legal appeals are exhausted.
“Its effect is to stop all proceedings ab initio (from the beginning) and render the defendant as if he or she had never been charged,” Timothy A. Razel wrote in a 2007 Fordham Law Review article about the principle. The practical effect of this is that evidence from Hernandez’s criminal trial cannot be used in any potential civil trials against his estate.
Said Martin W. Healy of the Massachusetts Bar Association: “Unfortunately, in the Odin Lloyd matter, for the family, there won’t be any real closure. Aaron Hernandez will go to his death an innocent man.”

As Razel notes, the principle of “abatement ab initio” was most famously used during the Enron case earlier this century. Kenneth Lay, the former president of the energy company, was found guilty of 10 federal fraud-related charges in 2006 following a scheme in which the company conspired to hide its losses from its stockholders, who lost hundreds of millions of dollars when the company went bankrupt. Lay was expected to be forced to provide restitution to the stockholders when he was sentenced in October 2006, but he died of a heart attack three months before his sentencing. Over protests from federal attorneys, the judge in the case erased Lay’s conviction, citing federal court precedent