Owen Labrie is getting out – for now.
Judge Larry Smukler on Monday reinstated bail for the St. Paul’s School graduate, but ordered that he wear an electronic tracking device as an added restriction.
“I am cognizant of the fact that Mr. Labrie has spent two months incarcerated, and that that may have impressed the importance of compliance with him,” he said during a brief, packed hearing in Merrimack County Superior Court. “I’m not a hundred percent sure – that’s why I’m adding the electronic monitoring with GPS.”
Labrie, 20, will return to his mother’s home in Tunbridge, Vt., sometime later this week.
“As early as Wednesday, as late as Friday,” said Merrimack County Attorney Scott Murray.
Labrie’s bail was revoked in March after Smukler learned he had repeatedly violated a court-ordered curfew. Late last week, the state Supreme Court ordered that the issue be reconsidered, given that Labrie has now served a large portion of his one-year sentence and would likely serve the rest before it could hear his direct appeal. Labrie is contesting his convictions last summer of having sex with an underage student and using a computer to lure her. He has separately requested a new trial.
Appearing publicly in orange jail garb for the first time, Labrie was noticeably slimmer and more somber than in past proceedings. His hair has grown out. He never once turned to address his family. The only words he spoke were “yes, sir.”
His attorney, Jaye Rancourt, called the past two months in jail a “life-changing experience.” Labrie was initially subjected to nearly full isolation, she said, and has only recently been moved to a group cell with other county inmates. It has been simultaneously frightening, enlightening and tedious, she said.
“You have sent a message very loud and clear that they are not options,” Rancourt said, referring to the bail conditions.
Labrie can still leave his mother’s home with the monitoring device, but county officials will be better able to track his movements because of it. He is again required to be home between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m.
Prosecutors argued Monday that Labrie remains a potential threat, noting that he has yet to complete a new psycho-sexual evaluation, which was imposed at his sentencing. Labrie completed an evaluation in 2014, but prosecutors say the administering psychologist lacked some information from the case.
Rancourt told reporters later that the evaluation is part of the appeal, and that Labrie has no intentions of undertaking it until that’s settled. She said he has secured part-time manual labor, but declined to give details.
Monday’s hearing came as a bit of a surprise, even to the Concord court. Smukler, who is semi-retired and has been buried in work from another high-profile case, called for the proceedings that morning, just two business days after the Supreme Court’s directive. With both full-sized courts occupied upstairs, attendees were squeezed into a tiny, rarely used first floor space.
Smukler didn’t mince words, issuing a quick, terse decision and noting, as an aside, that he expects Labrie’s Supreme Court appeal to fail. Given his other case, it will likely be well into the summer before he can address the separate new trial request.
Smukler also responded Monday to what the Supreme Court has said could be a “non-frivolous issue” about whether Labrie’s defense was wrongly barred from questioning his roommate about claims that he too was engaging in illicit sexual behavior with underage girls.
According to a trial transcript released last week, the defense had tried to say that the mother of a freshman girl was concerned that the roommate, Andrew Thomson, was having sex with her daughter. Smukler denied the request, according to the transcript.
But in a written order Monday morning, Smukler corrected the record. Though he denied the request initially, he wrote, he reversed it later that day and gave defense attorney J.W. Carney a chance to cross-examine Thomson more fully – a chance Carney never took.
Labrie’s attorneys have since argued that the allegations against Thomson influenced his testimony, giving him motive to cooperate with police and prosecutors. Thomson, the son of Lucy Hodder, a St. Paul’s trustee member and Gov. Maggie Hassan’s former legal counsel, testified that Labrie had told him he had sex with an underage freshman girl.
But prosecutors insist Thomson was never the subject of a criminal complaint, as have both Thomson and Hodder through their attorney. St. Paul’s has also denied claims by Carney that it struck a deal with Thomson to stay off campus for three years.
(Jeremy Blackman can be reached at 369-3319, jblackman@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @JBlackmanCM.)