Brian Peixoto’s Final Appeal

In 2015, quite by accident, Peixoto’s new attorney discovered an astonishing fact that had never come out at trial: At the time of Christopher’s death, Sneed was being accused of neglect—by the child’s father.

Christopher Affonso Sr., a heavyset general contractor who was 25 when his son and namesake died, was the prosecution’s strongest witness during Peixoto’s trial that Sneed was a good mother. He had met Sneed in 1990 when she was 15, and she had moved in with him after giving birth to Tarisa the following year. Christopher Jr. arrived in 1993; eight months later they broke up. When prosecutor Dupuis asked him under oath to describe Sneed’s interactions with their son, he said, “They were fine,” adding, “I mean, she wasn’t abusive to the children at all.”

It was a small line, but it carried enormous weight at trial. Dupuis seized on the father’s testimony during remarks to the jury in which she described Christopher as “very well cared for” by Sneed. In a case in which medical evidence at the time pointed to either Peixoto or Sneed, showing that Sneed was a loving mother was vital to the prosecution. Yes, Dupuis conceded, Sneed had her foibles—“Should she have been schlepping her two little kids off to the house of some guy she just barely knew? No.”—but Dupuis argued that the jury should trust Affonso because “of all people who would have a motive, outside of the defendant, to portray Ami Sneed in a not-so-favorable light, it’s Christopher Affonso Sr.” After all, the prosecutor pointed out, there was a “probate battle going on” over Tarisa’s custody.

But those probate records, which have never been made public and apparently were not turned over to Peixoto’s defense attorney, tell a very different story. “Ami Sneed was not an adequate parent to my children,” Affonso wrote two months before stating nearly the opposite on the witness stand. “I do not believe that Ami Sneed can keep Tarisa safe from emotional and physical harm.”

In the months leading up to Peixoto’s 1997 trial, Affonso had one goal: keep sole custody of Tarisa. The Department of Social Services (since renamed the Department of Children and Families) had taken emergency guardianship of her at Saint Anne’s Hospital in light of the growing suspicions that her brother was the victim of child abuse. The next day, the agency filed a care-and-protection petition—which is used to protect children from potential abuse or neglect—and awarded custody of Tarisa to her father, with Sneed allowed only supervised visits. Meanwhile, as police zeroed in on Peixoto, the DSS opened its own investigation into Sneed, documenting problems with her parenting prior to Christopher’s death.

In the probate file, Affonso pointed to DSS reports and a teacher’s letter concerning Tarisa’s low performance and spotty attendance in preschool. The records describe Tarisa as shy, moody, whiny, and withdrawn from the other kids, and stated that Sneed often brought Tarisa to school late, or not at all. A concerned teacher and a social worker visited Sneed at home in September 1995, only to find Tarisa and Christopher still in bed at 10:30 a.m. When Sneed woke them up, according to a DSS report, Christopher was wearing a soaking-wet diaper and “picked up an old bottle of milk and started drinking it” without Sneed checking to see if the milk had spoiled. When the social worker returned to Sneed’s home within a couple of months, she reported, Christopher was once again in a soaked diaper, his body filthy as if he had just been “playing in the dirt.” Sneed, meanwhile, was “busy painting her nails” during the social worker’s visit, the report noted, and her home was “dirty and unkept.” On January 16, 1996, six days before Christopher’s death, Tarisa was withdrawn from preschool due to poor attendance. While there were no “documented concerns of abuse” in Tarisa’s DSS file, another report noted that Tarisa had an unusually large number of doctor visits and there was concern over the number of times Sneed did not show up for follow-up appointments.

While most of Affonso’s concerns centered on Tarisa, several involved Christopher. Sneed initially lied to Affonso, he claimed, about the circumstances surrounding their son’s fall down the stairs. Rather than telling Affonso that Christopher had tumbled down a pair of steps at her mother’s home while she was present, Affonso’s attorney stated, Sneed told him that Christopher “got up in the middle of the night and fell down a flight of stairs” at Sneed’s mother’s house, and without “waking the grandmother, the three-year-old got back into bed and went back to sleep with a broken clavicle.” The attorney wrote that Affonso “seriously questioned whether a child would break his collar bone and go back to sleep without crying.” Affonso considered filing an abuse-and-neglect report with the state, but didn’t, he stated, after Sneed begged him to believe her.

Finally, Affonso accused Sneed of possible abuse, stating Tarisa continued to be “at risk of physical abuse” when in her mother’s care, and aired suspicions that Sneed had something to do with Christopher’s death. Affonso’s attorney declared in probate court that Sneed had downplayed the bruises she had observed on the boy the night before he died, writing, “The medical evidence directly conflicts with [Sneed’s] statement, and further calls into question her involvement with Christopher’s fatal injuries.”

As she did in the probate filings at the time, Sneed denies Affonso’s claims, telling me, “Obviously he’s gonna say what he has to say to try to get custody of Tarisa.” Bringing the probate case up now is the desperate act of a guilty man, she says of Peixoto: “The guy’s got nothing better to do than sit there and pick at any area he can to try to get his freedom.”

Yet Affonso’s statements in the probate file also appeared to back up Peixoto’s version of what happened the night Christopher died. Six weeks before Peixoto’s trial started, Affonso filed a sworn affidavit recounting the moment he learned Christopher was at the emergency room. “On January 22, 1996, Ami telephoned my home hysterical,” Affonso wrote. “She told me that she had witnessed Christopher having a seizure. She described him being on his knees hitting his head on the floor and throwing up. She told me to rush to the hospital.”

If Affonso told police or the prosecution about that phone call, it was not recorded in their reports, and he did not mention it when he testified under oath. When asked about the discrepancies between his probate claims and trial testimony, Affonso told me, “Well, they didn’t really ask me any of those questions during the trial.”

Affonso also maintained that Sneed was not a good mother. “Obviously she wasn’t,” he said. “My son is dead.” Still, he believes Peixoto killed his son. He’s “guilty,” Affonso said, “but I’m hoping they let him out so that I can get my hands on him.”

Peixoto’s attorney, Jennifer Fitzgerald—a former Rhode Island public defender and advisory board member at Injustice Anywhere, an organization that works to overturn wrongful convictions—was floored after reading the probate file. She says the evidence contained in the documents would have been “critical” to Peixoto’s defense, and if the prosecutor was aware of its existence, she had an obligation to turn the file over to Peixoto’s lawyer—and not allow Affonso to contradict himself on the stand without the defense knowing it. Prosecutors “allowed this witness to testify about how [Sneed] is a good mother and meanwhile he has a neglect petition against her?” Fitzgerald says. “You’re giving the jury an incredible mischaracterization of what was actually going on here.” If Peixoto’s trial attorney had access to those records, it could have been a game-changer. “When you’ve got a smoking gun in your arsenal,” Fitzgerald says, “you can’t stop a defense lawyer from using it if they have an opportunity.”

Did the prosecution deliberately keep this information from the defense? There’s no clear evidence that that was the case—although the prosecutor did mention the probate case at trial and there is evidence in the probate documents that she was acquainted with the ongoing custody battle. Despite multiple attempts to contact her, Dupuis was unavailable for comment.

Using this recently discovered evidence, Fitzgerald plans to file for a new trial under a state law allowing the trial judge to vacate a conviction “at any time if it appears that justice may not have been done.” The original trial judge, Hely, has now denied two of Peixoto’s appeals, but Fitzgerald is hoping that a new all-encompassing motion including the medical testimony and the new findings will convince him to rule that a new trial is the only way to prevent a substantial miscarriage of justice.

Buried among those new findings is Fitzgerald’s argument that the prosecution engineered Peixoto’s motive for the murder—that Christopher had wet his pants—with little to no evidence that it was true. Prosecutors framed their case around the notion that Peixoto often grew angry when Christopher wet himself, and repeatedly suggested to the jury that the boy’s death was the result of Peixoto’s rage. However, it is not clear where authorities learned that Christopher had wet himself the night he died. Neither Sneed nor Peixoto ever told authorities that Christopher wet himself that evening. The emergency doctor, John Arcuri, told police that the dead child had stool in his diaper, and a policeman reported seizing a “dirty” diaper from the hospital. But no one testified or presented evidence that Christopher, who still had 10 milliliters of urine in his bladder at the time of his autopsy, ever wet himself.

In July, Fitzgerald also interviewed Brian Legendre, the firefighter who noticed Christopher’s bruises in the ambulance two decades earlier. Legendre said he “was certain that the diaper Christopher had been wearing was clean and dry at the time,” says Fitzgerald, who plans to file a sworn affidavit from the firefighter in court. She says, “The way that the evidence was presented to the jury…was so misleading that it clearly amounted to Peixoto not receiving a fair trial.”

Now, nearly 20 years since his conviction, the odds are more stacked than ever against Fitzgerald’s client. “I’m facing such an inconceivably high burden of proof that basically the only way I can even have this thing heard is to show that the amount of error in this case is just voluminous,” she says. “It’s so difficult to do that. But when you read Brian’s case end to end, it’s a strong argument to be made.”