CONCORD – The state Supreme Court unanimously upheld Christopher Gribble’s first-degree murder conviction in the 2009 death of Mont Vernon mother Kimberly Cates, rejecting three points his lawyers raised on appeal.

Gribble’s attorneys challenged his conviction by arguing that statements he made to state police should have been excluded from the trial, that the trial itself was polluted by media coverage and should have been moved, and that the judge’s instructions to the jury before deliberations unfairly favored the state.

The Supreme Court justices rejected all three points and affirmed Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Gillian Abramson’s rulings and the jury’s guilty verdicts.

Gribble, now 23 and formerly of Brookline, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing 42-year-old Cates and attacking her then-11-year-old daughter, Jaimie, on Oct. 4, 2009. The jury unanimously rejected Gribble’s insanity defense at the end of the March 2011 trial.

He and Steven Spader, now 21, were convicted of murder and other felonies.

Gribble argued that his confession to state police investigators John Encarnacao and Jeffrey Ardini violated his Miranda rights because at one point he refused to continue talking with the troopers. He said Encarnacao’s answers to his own questions amounted to the “functional equivalent” of an interrogation, an argument the Supreme Court rejected.

“After the defendant was left alone in the interview room, there is no evidence that he had any other conversations with troopers until he later initiated contact with Trooper Encarnacao,” according to the decision. “In light of these facts, we fail to see how the defendant would perceive Encarnacao’s later responses to the defendant’s questions as the functional equivalent of interrogation.”

Gribble also argued that the stories appearing in The Telegraph and other newspapers and on television about his trial and also that of Spader’s poisoned the county-wide jury pool and made it impossible for him to fairly argue he was criminally insane.

His attorneys asked Abramson to move the trial out of Hillsborough County twice before the trial, including immediately after the jury was chosen. Both motions were denied.

The Supreme Court said newspaper articles quoting a handful of people expressing anger and horror after the crimes does not lead to the conclusion that a jury of 12 in a county of about 400,000 was biased.

The court also ruled that the nature of the stories were not inflammatory.

“We agree with the trial court that an overwhelming amount of the material submitted consists of straightforward, factual accounts of the crimes as recounted at Spader’s trial and the proceedings leading up to the defendant’s trial,” according to the ruling.

Finally, Gribble’s attorneys argued that Abramson’s instructions to the jury before they began deliberations unfairly commented on the evidence and gave the impression that she favored the state’s definition of mental disease.

“We find that a reasonable juror would not have understood the instruction as supporting the state’s theory of the case; rather, it empowered the jury to consider any evidence that it deemed relevant to the issue of the defendant’s insanity,” according to the ruling.

Joseph G. Cote can be reached at 594-6415 or jcote@nashua
telegraph.com. Also follow Cote on Twitter (@Telegraph_JoeC).