A day after the reversal of his conviction for killing 15-year-old Martha Moxley, notorious Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel is now asking to be sprung on bail — so that he can see his own son, George, aged 14.
Skakel “has been imprisoned for the vast majority of his son’s life, based upon a conviction not worthy of reliability,” wrote in papers filed Thursday in Connecticut Superior Court in Rockville .
“Both [Skakel] and his son deserve the opportunity to re-establish the father-son bond that they both have been yearning for over the last eleven years, but which has been unjustly denied,” the bail petition reads.
The bail request further embittered Moxley’s mom, Dorthy, who maintains her belief that it was Skakel who bludgeoned her little girl to death with one of his family’s expensive golf clubs and left her dead beneath a tree in her Greenwich yard on Mischief Night, 1975.
“Should Michael Skakel get out of prison, I have no doubt that the first thing that he would want to do is see his son,” she told The Post.
“I would want Michael to become — should he be free — a wonderful father and a good citizen,” she added. “But I’m sorry, I can’t forgive him.”
Skakel is asking for bail of $500,000 or less, and has made that request to the same judge who on Wednesday overturned his 2002 conviction in Moxley’s murder on grounds that his trial lawyer, Michael “Mickey” Sherman, failed to adequately represent him.
That judge, Superior Court Judge Thomas Bishop, has asked that before he address Skakel’s bail, both sides first submit briefs on whether he has jurisdiction, a court spokewoman said.
Those filings will delay the Skakel bail application by at least another week, meaning that Skakel, the nephew of Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, will remain for now at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, where he is serving a 20-year sentence.
Sherman, meanwhile, remained unbowed despite the judge’s ruling that he “was in a myriad of ways ineffective.”
“Many people have asked me if I have mixed emotions about the decision,” Sherman said in a written press statement.
“I do not because Michael Skakel was innocent from the get go and I am absolutely delighted that he will be going home.
“I have also been asked if I mind being thrown under the bus and the bottom line is this is about justice and whether Michael Skakel should have been sent to jail and the answer is a very clear no,” he said. “If my reputation suffers some collateral damage, so be it.”
The lawyer added, “I represented Michael Skakel to the best of my ability and there isn’t a heck of a lot I would have changed had the case been redone. Period.”
Earlier Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reasserted his belief that his cousin is innocent in an interview with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer.
Kennedy again aired his theory that the murder had been committed by friends of football star Kobe Bryant’s brother, Toby, along with his belief that his cousin has a solid alibi.
“Michael Skakel was 11 miles away with five eye witnesses when this murder occurred,” Kennedy said. “The problem was — his one crime was –that he had a very, very poor representation and Mickey unfortunately did not call those witnesses.”
One of those alibi witnesses, a former family friend, Denis Ossorio, now of Rye Brook, NY, told The Post Thursday that he is willing and able to tell his story to Skakel’s next jury — that he, Skakel, and four other Skakel family members were at a cousin’s home watching Monte Python at the time of the murder.
Ossario was Skakel’s only non-family alibi witness, yet was never called at the 2002 trial, one of the oversights cited in Wednesday’s conviction reversal.
“I’m 70 and sometimes have some lapses,” Ossorio, a former psychologist from Rye Brook, NY, told The Post. “But there were certain things that were indelible about that evening that imprinted on my memory.”
Meanwhile, legal experts said that the best route for both sides would be a plea deal, which would save prosecutors from the potential expense and embarrassment of losing a retrial, and save Skakel from the risk of implicating his older brother, Thomas, who was originally suspected in the murder, but never charged.
“He’d be an idiot not to just plead guilty for time served,” said Connecticut defense lawyer and former Bronx prosecutor Philip Russell.
“He still runs a risk of being re-convicted, no matter how slight. And there’s nothing funny about a murder conviction.”