Abbott takes his appeal to state Supreme Court
Sentenced killer Colin Abbott is asking the state’s Supreme Court to hear his appeal.
The 43-year-old New Jersey man already unsuccessfully tried to have the county courts and the state Superior Court allow him to back out of his plea arrangement on two counts of murder and instead have a trial.
Prosecutors believe Abbott killed his father Kenneth Abbott, 65, and Celeste Abbott, 55, as part of a plan to erase $2 million in debt to his father and to inherit the couple’s $4 million estate. Investigators found the couple’s remains burned and scattered on their 25-acre Brady Township estate July 13, 2011.
In exchange for Abbott’s plea, prosecutors dropped their intent to seek the death penalty and instead recommended his current sentence: 35 to 80 years in state prison.
But days after being sentenced, Abbott wrote a letter to Butler County Judge William Shaffer asking that the plea deal be undone and that he be given a trial.
In addition to claiming he was under duress, Abbott alleged that a deteriorating relationship with one of his defense attorneys and unanswered questions about the evidence against him amounted to a “manifest injustice,” the standard to back out of a plea arrangement after sentencing.
Shaffer denied Abbott’s request, asserting that his “demeanor and lucidity” during the plea hearings belied his claim that he was under extreme duress. Further, Shaffer wrote that even if all of Abbott’s claims were true, they still wouldn’t hit manifest injustice.
A three-judge panel of the state Superior Court later affirmed Shaffer’s decision, noting that prosecutors in the Butler County District Attorney’s office had presented as evidence a compact disc containing nine recorded telephone calls made of Abbott from prison during which Abbott “and his mother discussed ways to garner publicity and to create judicial chaos by filing the motion to withdraw his plea. These additional statements further belie (Abbott’s) assertion on manifest injustice.”
Public defender Joseph Smith, one of several attorneys who has or had represented Abbott during criminal proceedings, filed the request this week with the state Supreme Court.
While the continued appeals have been in motion, the status of Kenneth Abbott’s estate remains on hold.
Colin Abbott had been named his father’s largest heir. But attorney’s representing the state have asked the courts to apply the state’s Slayer’s Act and forbid him from inheriting any money.
“The court ordered that all direct appeals were to be resolved prior to a ruling on the Slayer’s Act petition,” said Butler attorney Ron Elliott, who represents the estate as well as Kenneth Abbott’s sister and estate executor, Kathleen Neal of Virginia.
The requests to the Superior and Supreme courts are considered direct appeals.
However, Elliott said if Abbott chooses to later file a Post Conviction Relief Act, which would raise other issues from the court process and often includes a complaint that a lawyer represented the defendant in an ineffective manner, that would not be a direct appeal, but rather a collateral appeal.
Abbott is serving his sentence in a state prison in Somerset.
