Council for convicted killer and former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez now claims that the Russians hacked his jailhouse phone calls, and may want the evidence thrown out of court over a violation of client-attorney privileges.
Hernandez attorney George Leontire insisted this week that maybe the Russians released the contents of the Hernandez phone calls in an effort to damage his defense against murder charges, according to a report by NECN.
“It could be a Russian hacker, with all respect, like WikiLeaks, who was able to backdoor into the system,” Leontire said during a pretrial hearing for the second murder case against his client. “We don’t know,” he added.
The wild claim came during the discussion of how Securus Technologies, the company responsible for the jail phone system, had somehow allowed unknown persons to gain access to the phone records.
“We know these phones were hacked. We still don’t know who hacked them,” Leontire said as he pronounced the breach of the calls a violation of his client’s privacy.
The calls were apparently hacked after Hernandez transferred to a Boston jail during his first trial for the murder of former semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd, a case he lost and which sentenced him to life in prison.
The former Patriot will stand trial in February for the fatal shooting of two men he met at a Boston nightclub in 2012. Prosecutors have alleged that Hernandez killed the men after one of them bumped into him. Hernandez has pleaded not guilty in the deaths of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu and apparently this latest ploy is an effort to poison evidence found in the phone calls.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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