More than nine years after he was found guilty of killing his third wife, Drew Peterson is returning to a Will County courtroom in the new year to ask a judge to vacate the jury’s verdict.
In 2012, Peterson was sentenced to 38 years in prison after a jury found him guilty for the death of Kathleen Savio. Her death was reexamined after Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, went missing in 2007. The former Bolingbrook police officer has been identified as a suspect, but never charged, in Stacy’s disappearance, which remains an open investigation.
In a six-page handwritten motion filed in October, Peterson says his lead attorney, Joel Brodsky, did not provide effective counsel and that other attorneys who represented him were threatened with removal from the case by Brodsky if they disagreed with him.
Peterson also argues that two of the state’s key witnesses, Neil Schori and Harry Smith, should not have been allowed to testify about what Stacy Peterson told them regarding Savio’s death or her own concerns about Peterson. Peterson argues conversations with Schori, a pastor, and Smith, an attorney, should have been privileged. However, both were allowed to testify under the state’s hearsay law.
Peterson claims he wanted to testify in his own defense, but Brodsky did not allow it, and that Brodsky prodded Peterson to do media interviews before the trial, telling Peterson that if he didn’t “have anything to hide go on television and say so.” He argues the national media coverage about the case and a television movie about him that aired before his trial hindered his chances at a fair trial and that he should have been granted a change of venue. He also alleges prosecutorial misconduct and witness intimidation in his filing.
Peterson, who maintains his innocence, closes his motion with a simple plea.
“Please help me!” it reads.
Finding that there is a “gist of a constitutional” claim, Will County Judge Edward Burmilla agreed to hear Peterson’s plea and assigned Peterson, who filed his motion pro se, a public defender and two investigators from the public defender’s office.
Peterson, who is serving his time at an Indiana prison, will appear before Burmilla on Jan. 21.
The Will County state’s attorney’s office filed a 23-page response addressing each of Peterson’s claims.
In the response, the state’s attorney’s office notes some of Peterson’s claims were addressed on previous appeal, and that higher courts have ruled against Peterson and upheld his conviction. In other instances, prosecutors argue the issues were not raised on direct appeal and therefore cannot be raised now.
Prosecutors also pulled from court transcripts in an effort to debunk some of Peterson’s arguments. Court transcripts, for example, show that Peterson was advised of his rights and asked if he wanted to testify on his own behalf. Peterson said he would not, and never mentioned that Brodsky would not allow him to testify.
Prosecutors also flatly deny any misconduct or witness intimidation.
“This is again, a claim defendant makes in his petition without any support whatsoever,” prosecutors state in court documents responding to Peterson’s motion.
In an interview with the Tribune, Brodsky agreed with prosecutors that many of Peterson’s claims were, or could have been, raised on appeal and that higher courts have upheld Peterson’s conviction and have not found anything improper about his trial.
“There’s nothing here,” said Brodsky, whose law license was suspended for two years in 2019.
Brodsky, who has not returned to practicing law since his suspension ended in 2021, also suggested there’s only a few reasons, generally, why lawyers don’t put their clients on the stand, one of them being that they believe they may lie.
Brodsky said Peterson claiming he was not allowed to testify could be a “double-edged sword” because it opens the possibility that Brodsky could be called to explain why Peterson didn’t testify.
“I don’t think he wants to do that, if he really thought about it,” Brodsky said.
In addition to a 38-year sentence, Peterson was sentenced to 40 years in prison after being convicted in 2016 of trying to hire someone to kill Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow.
