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New jury trial for Romolor set
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Posted on Mar 20 2019
The CNMI government has decided to push forward with the rape case against Manolo Romolor and the defense has agreed to schedule a new jury trial.
During a status conference last Monday, both parties in the case against Romolor agreed on a new jury trial.
Superior Court Presiding Judge Roberto Naraja set the new trial on May 13, 2019, starting, again with the selection of jurors.
Romolor’s lawyer, Bruce Berline, said that he would like to file multiple motions before the trial so Naraja scheduled a motion hearing to hear all motions on April 30.
This comes after the Naraja cited “prosecutorial misconduct” in declaring a mistrial in Romolor’s case back on Feb. 15, 2019.
“After reviewing the parties and listening to the arguments, and the audio of the trial, I am declaring a mistrial due to prosecutorial misconduct. The written order will follow explaining the court’s reasoning in detail. Briefly, the court would like to note that there were nearly 80 objections against the Commonwealth, a curative instruction to mischaracterization of the Commonwealth, and numerous instances of testifying and inappropriate use of the complaining witness’ first name. These excessively large amount of errors infected the trial. …Continued instruction could only shield the jury so much,” Naraja said.
The court cited 14 circumstance of mischaracterization of a witness testimony, multiple hearsay issues, multiple instances of lack of foundation, 22 circumstances where the government was testifying during direct examination, and 10 circumstances where the government referred to the victim by her first name.
“…most of these issues would likely not be a cause of a mistrial. However, these issues are not looked at individually…they are examined collectively. Therefore, in a situation such as this, a mistrial was the only course of action.
