The Massachusetts Appeals Court has rejected a request for a civil rights injunction against former state Sen. J. James Marzilli Jr. to bar him from harassing all women in Massachusetts, Boston.com reported Thursday, Oct. 22.

The court's ruling upheld a decision by a Superior Court judge who found that three women who claim they were groped and harassed by Marzilli are not entitled to an injunction on behalf of all women in the state.

"They got it right," Marzilli's attorney, Karen A. Colucci Pelletier, told YourArlington on Friday, Oct. 23, referring to the decision by the three-judge panel.

A senior attorney at the Bellotti Law Group in Cambridge, she said the law involved in this case may be applied to redress grievances in two ways -- by an individual or by the state attorney general when the issues applied to a group.

She said she believed that Wendy Murphy, the women's attorney, tried to apply, incorrectly, what an attorney general only may do.

She said she doubted a further appeal would be successful.

State House News Service reported that Murphy plans to take the case to the Supreme Judicial Court.

In September, Terry Kennedy, another attorney for Marzilli, said that Marzilli's trial had been put off until January while the state Supreme Judicial Court reviews an appeal.

The SJC, the state's highest court, is to decide the validity of the most serious criminal charge the Arlington Democrat faces — an attempt to commit a crime (that is, indecent assault and battery).

The defense has appealed the charge, saying it is redundant. An assault can mean an attempt to commit a crime, but there is no current law against indecent assault alone.

Marzilli was due to go to trial last April, but Lowell Superior Court Judge Paul Chernoff sent the defense's appeal up to the Massachusetts Appellate Court, which sent the charge to the Supreme Judicial Court in September.

Marzilli was arrested in Lowell in June 2008 after he allegedly accosted a middle-aged women there and then led police on a foot chase.