John Cordani Jr. of Robinson & Cole. (Courtesy photo)

A Big Law trial lawyer who focuses on intellectual property cases has won a new trial for a convicted murderer facing dismal odds.

John Cordani Jr. is a member of Robinson+Cole’s business litigation group. He was certainly no novice at pro bono work. He hand defended clients facing charges ranging from breach of peace to murder, when he took on his nineteenth pro bono case in April 2017 on behalf of convicted murderer Eugene Walker.

But the road was long on this case, and the odds weren’t in his client’s favor.

First, Cordani had to face the reality that Walker was convicted of felony murder, first-degree manslaughter with a firearm and criminal possession of a pistol or revolver. And second, prosecutors sought to show his client had committed multiple crimes when he killed Neville Malacai Registe in a parking lot during a 2012 drug deal that went sour.

Cordani, a Robinson+Cole’s Hartford  partner since June, had previously worked at McCarter & English. But the business lawyer spent more than 150 pro bono hours on the case, which paid off when the Connecticut Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction. Now, his 34-year-old client will get a new trial, based the constitutional ‘confrontation clause,’ a Sixth Amendment provision that gives defendants in criminal cases the right to confront witnesses against them.

The attorney hinged the appeal on an unidentified forensic analyst, who was instrumental in gathering the evidence used to convict Walker.

During the investigation, supervisory forensic analyst Heather Degnan had performed a DNA extraction from a black bandanna that the state said the killer, whom it identified as Walker, had worn. But another analyst, whom the state declined to name, took a swab from Walker’s mouth and then devised a DNA profile from that. That analyst later sent the profile of the swab to Degnan, who compared the sample from the mouth to the one from the bandanna, and concluded that they matched.

Cordani said he knew he’d focus his entire 30-minute oral arguments on one issue.

“The hardest part for me was making sure I showed the justices that cross-examination was useful in these circumstances,” he said. “The U.S. Supreme Court once said that confrontation is the best legal device ever invented to find the truth, and that was so in this case.”

It’s not clear why the state never allowed the analyst to testify. Its lead counsel, Assistant State’s Attorney Timothy Sugrue declined to comment on the case.

But Cordani set out to put the scientist at the center of his arguments.

“I focused on citing case law and scientific material that showed that DNA forensics is not infallible,” he said, adding he studied textbooks to help make his point. “There are all sorts of ways an analyst could make errors, such as mixing the samples up. They can also make a mistake in interpreting the data.”