A Rindge man convicted of sexual assault of a child in 2014 has had his appeal denied by the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
The five Supreme Court judges denied the appeal of Jason A. Czekalski in an opinion issued on April 11. The opinion comes after a Feb. 16 hearing in which the court heard arguments about the appeal from the state and Czekalski’s attorney, Thomas Barnard.
Czekalski, a former lawyer, is currently serving a 30-to-60-year sentence at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men after a jury found him guilty of molesting an 11-year-old girl that he knew, during a 2014 trial at the Cheshire County Superior Court.
In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Barnard said the trial court made a mistake in denying Czekalski’s motion to suppress evidence related to a January 2013 phone call between himself and his victim. The argument states that suppression of evidence was warranted because the recording of the call was not done “in such a way as [would] protect the recording from editing or other alterations,” citing RSA 570-A.
The judges affirmed the Superior Court’s stance on the argument, disagreeing with Barnard’s interpretation of the RSA in question. The opinion states that police met the appropriate conditions set forth by law when intercepting the phone call.
In a supplemental brief filed with the court’s permission, it was argued that the trial court make a mistake when it denied Czekalski’s motion to continue, which was filed on the first day of the trial. The motion filed by Czekalski argued that transferring him from the Cheshire County House of Corrections in Keene to the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord two weeks prior had “deprive[d] him [of] access to counsel.”
The judges said in their opinion that the decision to grant or deny such a motion is within the discretion of the trial court.
“We will not overturn that decision unless it constitutes an unsustainable exercise of discretion,” read the opinion.
It is further argued in the brief that Czekalski’s transfer was illegal and “orchestrated by the prosecutor in retaliation for his having sued Cheshire County,” but the judges said the issue at hand had nothing to do with the transfer being unlawful.
Czekalski also challenged one of his aggravated felonious sexual assault indictments and an indictment for felonious sexual assault under the courts plain error rule, but the judges state that they could not conclude that the trial court had erred.
The last argument analyzed by the judges was Czekalski’s claim that one of the jurors in the trial had not completed a juror questionnaire. The judges said that the defense had failed to establish that the juror in question was seated without completing the juror questionnaire.
A spokesperson from the NH Supreme Court said that Czekalski’s remaining options would be to file a motion to have the Supreme Court reconsider or to take the appeal to the federal level.
Czekalski, who moved to Rindge with his family in 1990, had his law license suspended by the state Supreme Court in January of 2013. His LinkedIn page says he graduated from the Massachusetts School of Law with a J.D. in land use, planning and local government.
Nicholas Handy can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 235 or nhandy@ledgertranscript.com. He is also on Twitter @nhandyMLT.