ATLANTA — A judge has delayed a review of the $20 million bond for a man with Georgia ties accused of killing a Yale graduate student.
Qinxuan Pan was scheduled for a bail hearing Tuesday in Superior Court in New Haven, Connecticut.
At the request of Pan’s lawyer, the Supreme Court on June 29 ordered Judge Brian Fischer to explain by this Thursday why he set bail at $20 million.
“The 20 million dollars is tantamount to no bond at all. And in Connecticut you must have a bond that’s reasonable,” said William Gerace, Pan’s defense attorney.
Pan, who was a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MIT graduate, is charged with murder in the shooting death of Kevin Jiang on a New Haven street on Feb. 6.
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Prosecutors had asked for bail to be set at $50 million, saying Pan’s family is wealthy and he is a flight risk. Pan eluded authorities for three months before being arrested.
At one point, U.S. Marshals tracked Pan’s parents to Georgia. The parents said they got a call from Pan, saying he needed help, and they left Massachusetts to pick him up in Connecticut. Pan was not with his parents when the police found them.
Pan was caught days later in Alabama with $19,000 in cash, his father’s passport and several cellphones, police said.
Jiang, 26, an Army veteran who grew up in Chicago and was engaged to be married, was a graduate student at Yale’s School of the Environment. He was shot multiple times at close range shortly after leaving the apartment of his fiancee, Zion Perry.
Police have not disclosed a motive for the shooting.
The court also was expected to consider whether to schedule a probable cause hearing in the case. That was also put off as discovery in the case has not yet been completed.
Judge Gerald Harmon pushed the bail hearing back to July 28.
Information from The Associated Press and WTNH-TV used in this article.
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