Defense attorney files motion seeking new trial for Dalia Dippolito

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - The cameras are gone, the cables that snaked down courthouse hallways packed up, the national press reps on to the next trial - but the legal intrigue of Dalia Dippolito's case continues .

In a recently filed request, Dippolito's defense attorney, Michael Salnick, is arguing the Boynton Beach woman deserves a new trial after a host of legal errors were made in her recent one.

Salnick cites six instances, and argues they individually and cumulatively denied the 28-year-old her right to a fair trial.

Dippolito was convicted earlier this month of solicitation to commit first-degree murder after jurors rejected her reality-TV-made-me-do-it defense. Dippolito did not testify.

Salnick argues in his first point Chief Assistant State Attorney Elizabeth Parker made an inappropriate comment when she pointed to Dippolito in her closing statement to jurors, asking rhetorically 'Where's the testimony?' Parker was summing up various witnesses who said nothing about Dippolito hiring a hit man to kill her husband as a TV stunt. But Salnick argues Parker leaving her podium, walking over to Dippolito at the defense table and pointing at her while asking that question was a comment on her right to remain silent - a sacred cow of criminal trials.

Salnick also claims that Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath erred when he didn't allow individual questioning of prospective jurors in a trial with enormous local and national publicity. In addition, he didn't grant a mistrial when a prospective juror uttered in front of the entire panel that he had heard Dippolito tried to poison her husband, Michael, with anti-freeze, Salnick says in the filing.

Salnick also accuses Colbath of improperly commenting on evidence by joking before jurors about a witness who had the same surname as another character in the trial.

"The Trial Court's comments, in the form of 'levity,' clearly were a comment on the weight of the evidence and the Defendant's guilt," Salnick wrote.

In the fifth instance, Salnick writes the judge erred in granting Parker's request to include evidence of prior bad acts - including the range of suspicious things that happened to Michael Dippolito in the months before Dalia was filmed by police hiring a hit man. Those include drugs and an extortion note found on Michael's car, and Dalia's alleged theft of $100,000 he says he gave to her to pay off his court-ordered restitution.

Finally, Salnick argues the verdict form was improper, including a question of whether Dalia Dippolito possessed, used or carried a firearm. Jurors found she did, although there was no evidence of that at trial, he wrote.

Prosecutor Parker had not filed a response as of Monday, and no date for a hearing on the request had been set. Dippolito is to be sentenced June 16.