WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Attorneys for a Boynton Beach woman who found guilty of hiring an undercover police officer to kill her husband are seeking to dismiss her upcoming retrial.
Miami-based attorney Mark Eiglarsh and California-based attorney Brian Claypool, who are representing Dalia Dippolito in her retrial, filed a motion Tuesday in Palm Beach County to dismiss the case.
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The motion alleges police misconduct in the August 2009 investigation.
READ: Motion to dismiss retrial
Eiglarsh's office claims Claypool has evidence of police misconduct, including coercing the undercover informant, falsifying police reports, destroying records and enticing Dippolito.
The lawsuit alleges that the incriminating evidence police claimed to have obtained during their investigation "was all fruit of the poisonous tree that was tainted by the department's reprehensible and egregious behavior."
Dippolito was convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder in 2011, but the Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed the conviction last year. A Palm Beach County judge Thursday set her retrial for May 23.
Dippolito was arrested in August 2009 after she hired an undercover police officer, who was posing as a hit man, to kill her husband. Police then staged a crime scene and recorded her reaction on the day the murder was supposed to take place.
Jurors during the trial were shown an undercover video of Dippolito, offering an undercover officer pretending to be a hit man $3,000 to kill her husband.
In its opinion, the appellate court deemed that the trial court erred by denying her request to individually question prospective jurors about their exposure to pretrial publicity about her case and denying her request to strike the entire jury pool after all the jurors heard an allegation that Dippolito had attempted to poison her husband.
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Dippolito's then-attorney, Michael Salnick, argued during her trial that his client thought she was being recorded as part of a hoax to get her husband on a reality television show.
Dippolito, 32, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She has been out of jail on house arrest pending the appeal.
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