No matter if you believe Aaron Hernandez committed suicide or there was some foul play involved, because of a very obscure law he will now be seen as an innocent man in the eyes of the law.
At the time of his death, Hernandez was serving a life sentence without parole in a Massachusetts prison after he was found guilty of the 2013 killing of Odin Lloyd.
According to Massachusetts law, that conviction is automatically appealed to the state’s highest court.
Because Hernandez had not exhausted all of his appeals when he died, his conviction in the Lloyd case will be voided.
The void in the case is due to a legal principle called “abatement ab initio,” which in Latin, means to roll back a process to its beginning. It’s essentially a rule stating that a defendant that is deceased will be treated as though they never were convicted of that crime.
“Unfortunately, in the Odin Lloyd matter, for the family, there won’t be any real closure. Aaron Hernandez will go to his death an innocent man,” Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association told the Boston Globe. “But in a court of law, under legal principles, [Hernandez] died an innocent man.”
Honestly like a lot of laws in our country this is dumb as hell.
There is some speculation that Hernandez was aware of this and that might have been a motive for his alleged suicide.
We will never know though.