Boston Globe News article April 2000

A man convicted of stabbing his teenage girlfriend and throwing her weighted body into a pond is seeking a new trial, saying he should have been allowed to attend hearings in which a juror was dismissed.

Jamie Fuller was convicted in the 1991 killing of 14-year-old Amy Carnevale in Beverly in a crime that shocked the region for its cold-heartedness. Fuller, then 16, bragged of the killing to his friends but later claimed his judgment was clouded by steroids and alcohol.

Lawyer James Sultan said that through judicial error and ineffective representation by another lawyer at the time, Fuller was denied his constitutional right to be present at a key aspect of his 1992 trial.

While Fuller attended most of this trial, he was never offered a chance to be present when a juror was questioned about his encounter with the victim's mother. The juror was dismissed.

"It's a structural violation of his constitutional right to be present, especially when the stakes are so high," Sultan said.

But prosecutor Elin Graydon countered that no harm was done to Fuller's defense and the judge took the only available course in dismissing the juror. Graydon added that by failing to raise the issue during the trial, during appeal or during an earlier motion for a new trail, Fuller effectively waived the issue.

In 1995, the state Supreme Judicial Court rejected Fuller's appeal to have his life sentence overturned, saying the judge should have given him a special 20-year juvenile sentence. Fuller was 16 at the time of the killing, but the SJC noted that the sentencing judge ruled he could not be rehabilitated, and the sentencing option was not in effect when Fuller killed Carnevale.

Carnevale, a Beverly High School cheerleader, was stabbed to death on Aug. 23, 1991, when she and Fuller separated from two friends and walked off together into the woods. Fuller had told friends he was going to kill Carnevale and bragged about it afterward. Fuller allegedly said, "It sucks being you, Amy," and laughed as he pushed her body into Shoe Pond.

In 1994, both Fuller and his mother pleaded guilty to trying to arrange his escape from prison.