Nov 16, 2011 11:11 AM

A state court last week denied an appeal for a new trial by Anthony Oddone, the golf caddy who was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for the 2008 killing of a bouncer at a Southampton Village tavern—but the court also ordered that his prison sentence be reduced by five years.

A four-judge panel of the State Appellate Division issued a decision last Wednesday, November 9, that called the 22-year sentence he’d been given “excessive” and reduced it to 17 years, with five years of post-release probation.

The judges said in the decision that the reduction of the sentence was “a matter of discretion in the interest of justice” but gave no further explanation of their choice to reduce the sentence.

The judges were adamant, however, in their rejection of the grounds on which Mr. Oddone’s attorneys had insisted that he be given a new trial. They dismissed claims that the jury had not been offered enough evidence to prove that Mr. Oddone, now 28, had done more than just defend himself on August 7, 2008, when he held the bouncer at the Southampton Publick House, off-duty corrections officer Andrew Reister of Hampton Bays, in a choke hold for what the prosecution said was as long as two to three minutes. Mr. Reister, who witnesses said had asked Mr. Oddone to stop dancing on a table just before the struggle started, suffered cardiac arrest from the choke hold, never regained consciousness and died two days later after being declared brain dead and taken off life support. He was 40.

The judges said that they were satisfied the jury heard ample testimony from eyewitnesses of the struggle between the two men, and that the testimony was more than sufficient to have allowed them to reach a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Oddone’s attorney had argued that the jury had not heard enough evidence to conclude that he was not justifiably defending himself by putting Mr. Reister in the choke hold.

“We … accord great deference to the jury’s opportunity to view the witnesses, hear the testimony and observe demeanor,” the decision reads. “Upon reviewing the record here, we are satisfied that the verdict of guilt was not against the weight of the evidence.”

The judges also said that there were no grounds on which the court should have thrown out the testimony of a county forensic pathologist. At the April arguments before the Appellate Division judges in a Brooklyn courtroom, Mr. Oddone’s attorney, Marc Wolinsky, claimed that the defense had received affidavits from multiple accredited medical examiners, following the conclusion of the trial, stating that testimony the county pathologist had given with regard to how long Mr. Oddone must have held Mr. Reister in the choke hold was not based on good science.

The judges wholly dismissed the bulk of the defense’s other challenges without specific comment, saying they were simply without merit.

Nonetheless, Mr. Wolinsky said last week that the defense team does plan to appeal the conviction to another higher court. Mr. Oddone’s last avenue of appeal is to ask the State Court of Appeals, the highest state court, to hear arguments in the case. After the defense and Suffolk County district attorney’s office submit written briefs summarizing their positions the court has the discretion to simply reject the defense request for the right to present further written and oral arguments.

Mr. Oddone was convicted in December 2009 after a trial that saw testimony from more than 40 witnesses over more than two months. After nine days of deliberations, the jury cleared him of the most serious charge, second-degree murder, but found him guilty of first-degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years. While Judge C. Randall Hinrichs did not issue the maximum, he said at the sentencing that Mr. Oddone “must be punished, and in the court’s mind he must be punished severely.”

Having already served some 20 months in jail at the time of his sentencing, the original sentence would have meant the earliest Mr. Oddone could get out of prison—he’s serving his sentence at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County—with good behavior was April 2027. A determinate sentence requires that a convict serve seven-eighths of the sentence, which means he’ll now be eligible for release in late 2022 at the earliest.

Mr. Reister’s widow, Stacey Reister, sadi this week that she was displeased with the decision to reduce Mr. Oddone’s sentence, but that no sentence in the world would help her family recover from the tragedy of her husband’s death. “It doesn’t really matter what sentence they give the defendant. It will never change what he did with his bare hands for those three minutes in time,” Ms. Reister said in an email on Friday. “The lesser sentence does not change anything for me. My husband is still dead, and my children are still growing up without a father because of the hands of someone else.”