The cable TV executive accused of beheading his wife in Orchard Park last year now claims he was the one humiliated and abused.
Through his new lawyer, Muzzammil S. “Mo” Hassan claimed Friday that he was a “battered spouse” who was left emotionally out of control by the constant abuse his wife inflicted on him.
Hassan’s lawyer, Frank M. Bogulski, called the legal defense the first of its kind in the country.
“The spouse was the dominant figure in this relationship,” Bogulski told a reporter afterward. “He was the victim. She was verbally abusive. She had humiliated him.”
The allegations prompted an immediate rebuke from the prosecution.
“He chopped her head off,” District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III said of Hassan. “He chopped her head off. That’s all I have to say about Mr. Hassan’s apparent defense that he was a battered spouse.”
Hassan, 45, is charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 12 beheading of his wife, Aasiya Zubair Hassan, 37. The Pakistani-born couple were best known for Bridges TV, the station they formed in 2004 to counter negative Muslim stereotypes.
Nancy Sanders, a former news director at Bridges TV, expressed skepticism over the new abuse claim. She noted that Hassan stood over 6 feet tall and “filled a doorway,” while his estranged wife was slender and several inches shorter.
“I never ever heard her disparage him in the workplace at all,” Sanders told the Associated Press. “It just did not seem to be in her nature. She was very gentle.”
During Friday’s court hearing, Hassan fired the attorney who represented him for nearly a year and replaced him with a lawyer who promised “a revolutionary defense.”
Bogulski told reporters he is “confident” he can get an acquittal for Hassan on an unprecedented defense combining psychiatric elements and legal justification.
Homicide prosecutor Colleen Curtin Gable, though, noted that Hassan was beheaded about a week after she began formal divorce proceedings.
Gable won a motion to bar a psychiatric defense, but the judge told Bogulski he can seek to reinstate a psychiatric defense later.
The judge also expressed concern about delays in starting the trial, now scheduled for March.
Hassan, in one of his few public statements Friday, told the judge the delays stemmed from now-resolved financial matters concerning his four children by three wives. Those cases were resolved last month in Erie County Surrogate’s Court, he said.
“There’s been a lot of unnecessary delay,” Hassan told the judge, adding that he and his new lawyer hope to “expedite the process.”
Though his old attorney, James P. Harrington, worked out the financial disputes to Hassan’s satisfaction, neither he, Hassan nor Bogulski would comment on the change in lawyers.
Bogulski said he has already begun interviewing psychiatric experts as part of his strategy for using some form of a psychiatric defense. He stressed he also will use a justification defense based on the claim that Hassan was “a battered” spouse verbally abused and humiliated often by his wife.
Hassan has been jailed since he turned himself in to Orchard Park police about an hour after his wife was beheaded in the office of their television station.