‘SHAKY, MISOGYNISTIC’

Massachusetts’ High Court Rules Infidelity No Longer a Valid Murder Defense

The decision upheld the murder convictions of Peter Ronchi, who stabbed his pregnant girlfriend 15 times when she told him the child wasn’t his.

The highest court in Massachusetts on Tuesday upheld the twin murder convictions of a man who said he’d killed his pregnant girlfriend in 2009 because she’d admitted to sleeping with another man. Peter Ronchi’s defense team had sought a verdict of manslaughter in his 2012 trial, arguing that he’d “lost it” and stabbed Yuliya Galperina 15 times when she told him her unborn child wasn’t his. Galperina had been set to deliver the baby, named David, the same week of her death, according to The Salem News. Writing for the Supreme Judicial Court, which unanimously upheld Ronchi’s back-to-back life sentences, Justice Frank M. Gaziano declared that the argument of infidelity had “run its course,” adding it “rests upon a shaky, misogynistic foundation and has no place in our modern jurisprudence.” He added, “Going forward, we no longer will recognize that an oral discovery of infidelity satisfies the objective element of something that would provoke a reasonable person to kill his or her spouse.”