By Kate Turner ’21
News Editor
In a hearing on Tuesday, Dec. 8, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Thomas filed a motion to obtain the employment records of former Mount Holyoke Professor of Art and Studio Art Chair Rie Hachiyanagi based on the advice of an unidentified third party. According to Hachiyanagi’s defense attorney, Thomas Kokonowski, the anonymous third party is also employed by Mount Holyoke College.
As previously reported by the Mount Holyoke News, Hachiyanagi was charged with multiple counts, including attempted murder, following her alleged assault on a fellow Mount Holyoke faculty member sometime between Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, 2019, to which she has pled not guilty. She has been in custody since December 2019.
Thomas argued that Hachiyanagi’s employment records could “show some kind of modus operandi or state of mind of the defendant,” according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. In response, Kokonowski argued that the commonwealth’s motion is “extremely broad, if not overbroad.”
“[It] looks like they are looking for her entire personnel file or any discipline with other professors or people at Mount Holyoke College,” Kokonowski said in court. “If I read the commonwealth’s motion correctly, they’re looking for a different motive or more motive, which I have argued from the beginning either makes no sense or does not exist.” He added that there does not seem to be “a very specific date or situation” that the commonwealth is searching for in this investigation for new evidence.
On Wednesday, Nov. 18, Kokonowski filed a motion to dismiss two of the nine charges against Hachiyanagi: one count of home invasion and one count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on a person over 60 years of age.
Both charges revolve around whether Hachiyanagi was armed with a dangerous weapon upon entry of the defendant’s home and the subsequent attack. Kokonowski argued that the alleged victim never “told police she … saw the rock Hachiyanagi allegedly armed herself with” upon entry, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Through a “well-worded question,” the “commonwealth tries to place the rock … into Professor Hachiyanagi’s hand,” Kokonowski said. He argued that, though the defendant clearly describes Hachiyanagi’s use of a fire poker and garden shears in her statement, she never mentions seeing the rock.
Thomas responded, arguing that the victim reported she was struck “when she turned away from the threshold” after inviting Hachiyanagi into her home. He further stated that, as a professor of geology, the victim “knows how a rock feels,” and that the object with which she was struck “did not yield as a fist would yield to flesh.”
“This attack takes place over the course of several hours with multiple weapons,” Thomas said in court. “She [the victim] might not be able to see the rock, but that’s by [Hachiyanagi’s] design.”
According to the initial incident report from Massachusetts State Trooper Geraldine L. Bresnahan, Hachiyanagi’s alleged attack on the defendant involved “fists, rocks, garden clippers and a fire poker.” Investigators later recovered all of these objects.
An unopposed motion for the alleged victim’s ambulance records accompanied the defense’s motion to dismiss. Franklin County Superior Court Judge John Agnostini allowed the defense’s motion for records and said that he expects to quickly render a decision on the commonwealth's motion to obtain Hachiyanagi’s employment records. Both Thomas and Kokonowski were expected to review physical evidence on Wednesday, Dec. 9.
Agnostini told both attorneys that he expects Hachiyanagi’s trial to be a “priority” when trials begin operations again, according to the Greenfield Recorder. Massachusetts postponed jury trials for the remainder of 2020 and will not resume until at least Jan. 11, 2021, according to WBUR.
Though Thomas expressed optimism that the commonwealth would be “ready when the court is ready” for Hachiyanagi’s trial, Kokonowski had some doubts.
Kokonowski explained to Agnostini that he has been unable to fully serve his client because of COVID-19 safety protocols, adding that the last week of November was the first time that he and Hachiyanagi had held a private conversation “without having to talk on telephones, which I do not trust, without having to hold up documents to the glass for my client to look at while the camera is trained on us.”
“There are sensitive things that I have not given to my client, and I have not held up to that glass,” Kokonowski said. “I think I have gone through all of the documents that I’ve been given by the commonwealth. I have not been able to go through them in any … important way with my client at this point, and I’m very concerned about that. I can tell you right now that I’m not ready for trial.”
“We do not know when we will be able to try a jury of 12 individuals,” Agnostini said. “It could be as early as April, May. It could be in June, July. It could be [in] September. I think it’s going to be in that time frame.”
Meanwhile, Hachiyanagi continues to be held in custody without bail. As previously reported by the Mount Holyoke News, due to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in Commonwealth v. Lougee, the commonwealth may hold pretrial defendants beyond normal time limits set by statute thanks to delays made necessary by COVID-19.
Under normal circumstances, Hachiyanagi should legally have faced trial or been released within 180 days of being placed into custody — around July of 2020. Instead, she will likely spend an additional year in custody before her trial.