Apr 27, 2011 10:57 AM

Attorneys for Anthony Oddone, the former golf caddy sentenced to 22 years in prison last year for killing a part-time bouncer at a Southampton Village tavern in 2008, will make their case in a Brooklyn appeals court this Friday morning that a new trial should be held.

The attorneys for Mr. Oddone will present oral arguments to a four-judge panel on why his December 2009 manslaughter conviction by a Suffolk County jury should be set aside. If the conviction is overturned, the case would be sent back to a Suffolk County court for retrial.

Mr. Oddone was acquitted of the most serious charge he faced, second-degree murder, but was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Andrew Reister, a 40-year-old Hampton Bays resident and father of two who worked part-time as a bouncer at the Southampton Publick House on his days off from his job as a guard at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead.

Mr. Oddone, who is serving out his sentence at the Attica Correctional Facility penitentiary upstate, will not be present in the courtroom on Friday. Once a person is convicted of a crime, he or she is not afforded the same rights as an accused defendant, and the State Department of Corrections refused a request by Mr. Oddone’s legal counsel to have him brought to the courtroom for the arguments.

The defense has already filed a brief laying out its arguments for a retrial in detail but declined to allow a copy of the brief to be shared with The Southampton Press prior to Friday’s arguments.

A friend of the Oddone family said the defendant is being represented before the appeals court by Mark Wolinsky of the Manhattan firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz. According to Mr. Wolinsky’s profile on the firm’s website, he is handling Mr. Oddone’s case pro bono and describes Mr. Oddone as having been “wrongly convicted.”

Mr. Wolinsky and his partner, Barry Skovgaard, are members of the The Bridge golf club in Noyac, where Mr. Oddone, who is originally from upstate New York, caddied during the summers while he was attending St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue. The two men and other members of The Bridge are believed to have paid for Mr. Oddone’s trial defense, which may have cost as much as $2 million. His defense attorney from the trial, Sarita Kedia, a former attorney for late mobster John Gotti, is advising on the appeal.

According to Bob Clifford, a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas W. Spota’s office, the defense has requested a half-hour to present its argument to the judges, an unusually long amount of time. Assistant District Attorney Annie Oh will represent the prosecution.

Attorneys familiar with the Oddone case said the trial was rife with issues that could give a court reason to order a retrial.

“I can tell you, there are a number of major issues in that case,” veteran criminal defense attorney William Keahon said this week of the Oddone trial. “I’ve seen the briefs, and they are great—supremely well-written and argued.”

According to attorneys who have argued cases before State Appellate Division panels, appeals arguments typically focus on problems that arose during the initial trial that might have meant the defendant did not get a fair trial, or that might have resulted in a jury being steered toward one verdict or another. The presentation of evidence by either the prosecution or defense, the handling of the case by the trial judge, and the conduct of the jurors themselves are common targets of appeals challenges.

“Basically, the panel of judges have already done extensive reading on the case before there are oral arguments—briefs, transcripts, accounts of the trial, everything,” attorney Joe Ferrante said on Monday. “They are well appraised of what you are arguing, and they present you with questions to make you put a finer point on your argument. Everyone walks out feeling like the judges beat the hell out of them.”

Lawyers arguing appeals sometimes attempt to convince the judges that the sentence handed down was not commensurate with the crime committed. Only rarely do appellate arguments focus on the facts of the case in an attempt to convince the judges that the grounds for the conviction itself are not supported by the evidence presented at trial. Mr. Ferrante, who recently won a retrial on appeal in the case of Zachary Gibian, a teenager who was convicted in 2007 of killing his stepfather with a samurai sword, said that the majority of appeals are dismissed by the appellate court on the grounds that while various problems may have arisen during a trial, they could not be reasonably expected to have had an impact on the outcome.