WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) – The jury deadlocked Wednesday in Dalia Dippolito’s trial on charges she tried to hire a hit man to kill her newlywed husband, a case that became famous when it was shown on the television show “Cops” and undercover videos were posted online.
Dippolito gave no visible response when Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley declared a mistrial after the four-woman, two-man jury said it was hopelessly deadlocked after nine hours of deliberations spread over two days. It was not immediately known if prosecutors will try the case a third time. A 2011 conviction and 20-year sentence was thrown out on appeal.
That first jury convicted her in three hours. The difference this time is that her new attorneys aggressively attacked the Boynton Beach Police Department, saying detectives were more interested in starring on “Cops,” which happened to be filming in town, than they were about doing a thorough investigation. Lead attorney Brian Claypool spent the trial ripping the police investigation, calling it “evil, manipulative, corrupt, self-serving.” He said informant Mohammed Shihadeh first told detectives Dippolito was a domestic abuse victim, and said they could have handled it simply by calling her.
Instead, Claypool said, detectives “escalated” the investigation to impress “Cops” producers, who were arriving in town to film cases with the department. He slammed detectives for not recording dozens of phones calls and a key meeting between Shihadeh and Dippolito. He said police knew these conversations would damage their “script” by showing she was being pressured to meet with the supposed hit man.
Convicting Dippolito, he had told jurors, would reward the department’s “lying and cheating.” That allowed her to overcome potentially incriminating videos and audios, including one where she told an undercover police officer posing as a hit man that she was “5,000 percent sure” she wanted her husband dead.