Lawyers for former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez officially filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss his murder conviction following his suicide. Hernandez was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd when he was found hanged in his prison cell Wednesday.
The motion was filed in Massachusetts Superior Court Tuesday, according to a spokesman for the Bristol district attorney’s office, who noted that prosecutors will oppose the motion. Because Hernandez committed suicide, a legal rule known as “abatement” could be invoked, meaning Hernandez would posthumously be pronounced innocent.
“The idea is that if an appeal hasn’t happened, there’s a chance the conviction has an error in it,” Rosanna Cavallo, a professor at Suffolk University, told CNN after Hernandez’s death.