In Sapry case, judge rules prosecution to keep last word

LACONIA — The prosecution — not the defense — will get the last word in the murder-insanity trial of Hassan Sapry due to take place next month.

Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Leonard denied a motion by Sapry’s attorneys to allow them to present the final closing argument to the jury. Further, she rejected the defense’s fall-back request to divide the trial into two parts, with the first part devoted to the facts of the case and second to the question of insanity.

Sapry’s lead attorney, Mark Sisti, argued before the judge in a final pretrial hearing earlier this month that the defense should have the opportunity to make the final closing argument because it has the burden of proving that Sapry was insane at the time that Wilfred Guzman was killed in April 2019. As an alternative, Sisti proposed that closing arguments be divided into three parts, with defense first arguing about all aspects of the case except for Sapry’s sanity, then the prosecution making its closing arguments on the entire case, and finally the defense making its arguments regarding Sapry’s sanity.

In her ruling the judge rejected both alternatives.

She cited a prior legal ruling which concluded that changing the order of closing arguments except in a bifurcated trial “would tend to confuse the jury.”

“The court agrees with this assessment,” the judge said in her four-page ruling, “and is unconvinced of any legal reasoning to abandon it.”

Sapry’s attorneys had also asked that if their request to have the final closing argument was rejected that the judge allow for a bifurcated trial where the jury would first decide whether Sapry was guilty of Guzman’s death, and then hear evidence and render a verdict of whether he was legally insane. In a bifurcated trial the defense gets to make the final closing argument in the sanity phase.

Leonard wrote that the defense was going back on the decision it made at a June 8 court hearing not to seek a bifurcated trial.

“The court finds it inappropriate to allow [the defense] now to change [its] preference,” the judge wrote. While acknowledging that the defense had the right to seek a bifurcated trial “there is nothing in case law that suggests that the defendant can oscillate between waiving and asserting this right,” and do so one month before the start of the trial.

The judge also noted that to allow a bifurcated trial at this late date would cause problems for the prosecution regarding the potential availability of its witnesses of which there could be as many as three dozen.

Sapry, now 24, is facing charges of both first-degree and second-degree murder, along with charges of falsifying physical evidence, theft by unauthorized taking, and four counts of credit card fraud.

His attorneys have argued in court filings that Sapry was insane at the time of Guzman’s death due to the emotional trauma he suffered after seeing horrors as a child growing up in Iraq.

Both the defense’s and prosecution’s psychiatrists have concluded that Sapry suffers from prolonged serious mental illness, but disagree on whether that mental illness was the direct cause of the actions that resulted in Guzman’s death.