Sect member's lawyer says client can't pay

DEDHAM, Mass. -- The privately paid lawyer representing an Attleboro religious sect member charged with murder in the starvation death of her child told a Superior Court judge yesterday that his client is out of money and that he wants taxpayers to pay his bills from now on. Top

Lawyer C. Samuel Sutter told Judge Elizabeth Bowen Donovan that he is hoping to become the court-appointed lawyer for sect member Karen E. Robidoux, who is charged with second-degree murder in the 1999 death of Samuel E. Robidoux. In order to be appointed by the court, and paid with state money, Sutter must first be approved by the Committee for Public Counsel Services. He said that process could take two weeks.

This would be the second time in this case that Robidoux has been represented by a court-appointed lawyer.

Because Sutter's status was unclear, Donovan postponed a hearing that had been scheduled for yesterday on whether Robidoux and her husband, Jacques D. Robidoux, who is charged with first-degree murder, should have separate trials. Donovan said she will consider the separate-trial motion at the next pretrial hearing, April 25.

Donovan did rule on several other pretrial motions yesterday, including setting June 3 as the starting date for either a joint trial or the first of separate trials.

Karen Robidoux has filed a motion to be tried separately from her husband, arguing, among other things, that her defense may be antagonistic to his.

Prosecutors, citing thousands of pages of diaries seized from the insular sect, have said that when Samuel was 10 months old and had begun eating solid food, the sect began systematically starving the boy in response to a vision from God that one member said she had received. G. Michelle Mingo, Jacques Robidoux's sister, said that the vision directed that the boy was to consume only water and his mother's milk. By that time, though, Karen Robidoux was pregnant again and apparently unable to produce enough milk to sustain the boy, according to prosecutors.