WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – A Boynton Beach woman who was found guilty of hiring an undercover police officer to kill her husband testified Tuesday in a hearing for her retrial that she was acting for a television show and wasn't really plotting a murder-for-hire.
Dalia Dippolito testified during a pretrial hearing at the Palm Beach County courthouse that her former lover, Mohamed Shihadeh, threatened her with a gun and pressured her to speak to the undercover police officer posing as a hit man.
"He threatened to hurt me," Dippolito said. "He threatened to hurt my family."
Dippolito, 33, was convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but the Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed the conviction in 2014. Her retrial is set for May 23.
Police said Dippolito hired an undercover officer, who was posing as a hit man, to kill her husband. Police then staged a crime scene and recorded her reaction on the day the murder was supposed to take place.
Jurors during the trial were shown an undercover video in which Dippolito offered the undercover officer $3,000 to kill her husband.
Dippolito testified Tuesday that Shihadeh, who was a police informant, pressured her into an acting project for the television show "Cops."
"It was an actor who had faked it," Dippolito said. "And he was on the episode, and he gave us the idea on how to do it."
In her initial trial, Dippolito's then-attorney, Michael Salnick, argued that his client thought she was being recorded as part of a hoax to get her husband on a reality television show.
A motion filed late last year alleges misconduct by the Boynton Beach Police Department in the August 2009 investigation that led to Dippolito's arrest.
"They violate her constitutional rights, toss her under the bus, pressure her into doing this, so that they can make a good TV episode," defense attorney Brian Claypool told the media after Tuesday's hearing.
Boynton Beach Police Chief Jeffrey Katz said in a statement Tuesday that he stands by his detectives.
"We stand behind the principled work our detectives did on this investigation," Katz said. "We trust in our state attorney to successfully prosecute this case, and we are confident we have given his office sufficient evidence to meet the state's burden."
Dippolito has been out of jail on house arrest.