Pring-Wilson May Post Bail, Leave Jail

Alexander Pring-Wilson, the former Harvard graduate student convicted of manslaughter last year, will be freed today, awaiting a new trial, if he posts $400,000 bail.

Last Friday, the judge in Pring-Wilson’s case vacated his six-to-eight year sentence and gave him a retrial.

Guided by a recent Mass. Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decision, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Regina L. Quinlan decided that during the trial she had improperly disqualified evidence about the violent pasts of Pring-Wilson’s victim and the victim’s cousin.

Pring-Wilson, who was until 2003 a student at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, has been in prison since October 2004, when a Middlesex County jury found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter in connection with the 2003 stabbing death of Cambridge teen Michael D. Colono.

Pring-Wilson, now 27, encountered the 18-year-old Colono and Michael D. Rodriguez, Colono’s cousin, outside a Cambridge pizza parlor on April 12, 2003, as he was walking home after a night of drinking. A fight erupted between Pring-Wilson and Colono and his cousin­, with each of the two sides later claiming the other was at fault. Pring-Wilson fatally stabbed Colono during the altercation.

During the original trial, jurors learned that both Colono and Rodriguez had criminal histories, but they were not told many specifics. The new trial will include more of these details.

Colono had been convicted of possessing cocaine during an incident at another Cambridge pizza parlor in September 2001. Colono kicked in the store’s glass door.

Rodriguez has had several convictions for assault and battery. He was also charged in 2001 for unlawful possession of a firearm, according to court documents.

Pring-Wilson, who has no prior criminal record, is the son of two Colorado lawyers. His family has been able to meet $400,000 bail before.

At a hearing at the Middlesex County Courthouse Monday, the prosecution and defense sparred over the conditions of Pring-Wilson’s bail.

“Having had a taste of incarceration, there is a tremendous incentive for the defendant to avoid jurisdiction,” said Assistant District Attorney Adrienne C. Lynch, who led the prosecution during the original trial.

Lynch said that Pring-Wilson should be considered a flight risk for several reasons, including his “being a world traveler, [his] speaking several languages, and his considerable personal assets.”

But Charles W. Rankin, Pring-Wilson’s lawyer, noted that Pring-Wilson had not once violated the terms of his release during the 17 months he was free for the original trial. He also has an unblemished disciplinary record at the Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk, Mass., according to Rankin.

“My suggestion is that he be permitted to go and live with his family in Colorado,” Rankin said. He also requested Pring-Wilson be set free without having to post bail.

Quinlan sided with the prosecution, which had asked for the same restrictions to be imposed on Pring-Wilson as in his 2004 trial.

Quinlan ruled that Pring-Wilson must post $400,000 bail. She also posted several limitations on his travel—he will have to surrender his passport and wear an electronic bracelet that tracks his location.

He must remain at his residence in Massachusetts, except for doctor appointments and meetings with his attorney.

Because Pring-Wilson had been drinking the night he fatally stabbed Colono, he can also be subjected to random testing for alcohol and other drugs.

At Monday’s hearing, Quinlan also denied a request from the prosecution to reconsider her decision to grant Pring-Wilson another trial.

Lynch, the head prosecutor, had argued that Quinlan’s retroactive application of a March 2005 SJC decision was inappropriate.

According to that SJC case, jurors may learn about the alleged violent histories of a victim in a fight if it can help them determine who the aggressor was.

But on Wednesday, three of the jurors who voted to convict Pring-Wilson last year wrote a letter to the Boston Globe condemning Quinlan’s order for a new trial.

“We think the evidence of the case, regardless of who started [the fight], clearly demonstrates that there are not grounds for considering the murder of Colono as self-defense,” said Ceasar L. McDowell, an associate professor at MIT and the letter’s author, in an interview.

He referred to inconsistencies in Pring-Wilson’s testimony, as well as the pattern of wounds on Colono’s body, as evidence that suggested Pring-Wilson had not acted in self-defense.

But McDowell said he worried that in the new trial, the defense could shift the focus of the case to the “race and class [of Colono and Rodriguez],” as opposed to the “hard evidence of what actually happened” on April 12.

At the time of Pring-Wilson’s original trial, Massachusetts law permitted that information to be divulged to the jury only if the defendant knew of the victim’s violent past at the time of the incident.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said it planned to appeal Quinlan’s decision for a retrial.

­—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.