Anna Tang to go to trial this month
Currently under house arrest
Anna Tang, the former Wellesley student accused of stabbing Wolfe B. Styke ’10 while he slept in his Next House room in October 2007, will go to trial later this month.
Commonwealth v. Anna Tang will have a jury trial in Middlesex Superior Court on the morning of Monday, May 24.
Tang has remained under house arrest since early 2008, permitted to leave only to attend church, with her location monitored by a GPS ankle bracelet that communicates with her cell phone.
Tang inadvertently violated her parole on Saturday, October 10, 2009, when she left home for church but forgot to take her cell phone, triggering a response from the Framingham police, who arrested her. She was released from jail back to house arrest five days later.
Tang had been under considerable stress; according to a motion filed with the court in on July 21, her father, Jay Tang, has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and was leaving for China on July 27, “perhaps never to return.”
The court approved a change in Anna Tang’s house arrest so she could live with another family member, since she would no longer be able to live with her father.
Pre-trial activity in the case has been sporadic. Throughout 2008, the docket consisted mostly of discovery motions and the like, but in December 2008, both sides asked to postpone the trial in a joint motion, because Tang “will be relying on a defense of lack of criminal responsibility and/or diminished capacity,” and the defense required additional time for discovery, and the Commonwealth required additional time to have Tang evaluated by an expert witness.
The trial was postponed from January 2009 to October 2009 and then again to March 2010 and finally to this month.
The most recent events of substance in the case related to a motion (filed in August) from Tang to suppress statements she made after her October 2007 arrest, in light of her “mental illness.”
The Commonwealth filed its reply in November 2009, and the Court issued a 7-page decision denying the motion to suppress on March 8, 2010.
Tang’s trial will take place on May 24, 2010 at Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn.