Judge Gary White of Stamford Superior Court set bail at $ 1.2 million, ordering Mr. Skakel not to leave the state and to wear a tracking device so his movements can be monitored.
As the judge made his announcement, friends and relatives of Mr. Skakel, who is a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, burst out in applause. Mr. Skakel, dressed in a suit and blue tie, tapped his chest as he walked out of the courtroom, his family trailing behind.
It was the latest twist in a case that has by turns captivated the public and confounded investigators ever since 1975, when the battered body of a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was found beneath a tree in her family’s backyard, pieces of a broken 6-iron golf club by her side.
Mr. Skakel, now 53, was also 15 at the time of the murder, and the two were neighbors in a town that has long been a bastion of wealth and privilege. While he was long suspected of killing Ms. Moxley, it would be a quarter of a century before Mr. Skakel was tried and convicted. In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
The bail hearing came after Judge Thomas A. Bishop of Superior Court in Rockville ruled last month that Mr. Skakel did not receive a fair trial because his first lawyer, Mickey Sherman, had not represented him effectively, thereby depriving him of his constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel.
In a scathing 136-page ruling, Judge Bishop wrote that Mr. Sherman failed to show an attention to detail, lacked a coherent strategy and “was in a myriad of ways ineffective.” Those failures, he wrote, led to a “conviction that lacks reliability.”
After the ruling, Mr. Skakel’s current lawyer, Hubert J. Santos, filed a motion for his client to be released on bail. In a later hearing, Judge Bishop decided that the question of whether to grant bail belonged with the criminal court in Stamford, where he will be retried if the state decides to go forward with another prosecution.
From the outset, the case has attracted national media attention, offering a potent mix of power, money and sex. It inspired a made-for-television movie, and became a staple for tabloids and an unending source of interest for true-crime writers, particularly Dominick Dunne.
Mr. Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the link to one of America’s most famous families further fueled interest in the case.
Mr. Skakel’s trial lasted three weeks and revealed tawdry details about his life as a young man, including his drinking and his drug use. In his defense, Mr. Skakel acknowledged that on the night of the murder, he had climbed a tree and masturbated while trying to look into Ms. Moxley’s bedroom.
Throughout the trials and appeals, Mr. Skakel’s family has fought fiercely on his behalf, spending millions of dollars in various bids to win his freedom.
At a news conference outside the courthouse, Ms. Moxley’s mother, Dorthy, and brother, John, expressed disappointment at the decision but confidence that Judge Bishop’s decision to overturn the conviction would be reversed by the state’s appeal.
“We knew this day would come, so I wasn’t completely destroyed,” said Mrs. Moxley. She also remarked upon the seemingly endless situation: “There’s a lesson to parents: If your child does something wrong, face up to it.”
Mr. Santos used the bail hearing to once again criticize the original prosecution of Mr. Skakel. He said that the state’s case was weak and based largely on hearsay.
“If the prosecution found a homeless guy at a train station” who claimed that Mr. Skakel confessed to the murder, Mr. Santos said, “he would be on the stand in a New York minute.”
John Smirga, the lawyer for the state, defended the handling of the case but also noted the difficulties of prosecuting a crime so long after it took place.
“Each time the facts of this case are presented, they mutate,” he said. There was no single piece of evidence — like DNA, an eyewitness or a photograph — that could be used against the defendant, he said.
Instead, he compared the case to “a giant jigsaw puzzle,” but one without a picture to show what it is supposed to look like when all the pieces are put together.
Mr. Smirga said he was confident the state solved the puzzle and vowed to continue in its appeal of Judge Bishop’s decision to vacate the conviction.
Mr. Santos said that Judge Bishop’s ruling revealed critical flaws in the state’s case against Mr. Skakel.
Mr. Santos and the Skakel family said they would continue to fight until Mr. Skakel was fully vindicated.
“This is the first step in correcting a terrible wrong,” the Skakel family said in a statement. “We look forward to Michael being vindicated and justice finally being served.”
As the legal battles continue, Mr. Skakel was ordered to have no contact with the Moxley family.
He has a 14-year-old son, but after more than a decade in prison, no home to return to. His lawyer declined to publicly reveal where Mr. Skakel would go once he was released.
While the joy of the Skakel family was evident in the courtroom, Mr. Moxley said that he could not see how anyone could be happy about all that has happened.
Mr. Moxley said that even if Judge Bishop’s ruling cast doubt on Mr. Skakel’s guilt, it left a cloud of suspicion over his brother, Thomas, who was 17 when Ms. Moxley was killed. He was the last person known to have seen her alive.
“It is difficult to fathom how there could be any victory in this,” he said.
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