Quinlan ruled that Pring-Wilson must post $400,000 bail. She also posted several limitations on his travel—he will have to surrender his passport and wear an electronic bracelet that tracks his location.
He must remain at his residence in Massachusetts, except for doctor appointments and meetings with his attorney.
Because Pring-Wilson had been drinking the night he fatally stabbed Colono, he can also be subjected to random testing for alcohol and other drugs.
At Monday’s hearing, Quinlan also denied a request from the prosecution to reconsider her decision to grant Pring-Wilson another trial.
Lynch, the head prosecutor, had argued that Quinlan’s retroactive application of a March 2005 SJC decision was inappropriate.
According to that SJC case, jurors may learn about the alleged violent histories of a victim in a fight if it can help them determine who the aggressor was.
But on Wednesday, three of the jurors who voted to convict Pring-Wilson last year wrote a letter to the Boston Globe condemning Quinlan’s order for a new trial.
“We think the evidence of the case, regardless of who started [the fight], clearly demonstrates that there are not grounds for considering the murder of Colono as self-defense,” said Ceasar L. McDowell, an associate professor at MIT and the letter’s author, in an interview.
He referred to inconsistencies in Pring-Wilson’s testimony, as well as the pattern of wounds on Colono’s body, as evidence that suggested Pring-Wilson had not acted in self-defense.
But McDowell said he worried that in the new trial, the defense could shift the focus of the case to the “race and class [of Colono and Rodriguez],” as opposed to the “hard evidence of what actually happened” on April 12.
At the time of Pring-Wilson’s original trial, Massachusetts law permitted that information to be divulged to the jury only if the defendant knew of the victim’s violent past at the time of the incident.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said it planned to appeal Quinlan’s decision for a retrial.
—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.