In a legal brief, chief public defender John J. Hardiman said state prosecutors had made a motion that would allow them to proceed with prosecuting those 17-year-olds despite Procaccini’s ruling.

“The audacity of the attorney general’s request is astonishing: because he does not agree with the trial court’s dismissal of these actions, he requests leave to simply ignore it by proceeding on an accelerated path to disposition as if this court had never issued its decision at all,” Hardiman wrote.

“He wants to totally undercut this court’s dismissal by moving ahead with proceedings 100 percent inconsistent with dismissal and by so doing deprive these defendants of precisely the relief that this court held is due them.”

Hardiman cited a 1977 case in which the Supreme Court of Louisiana rejected an attempt by prosecutors to get around a ruling that rejected a change of venue for a highly publicized case, and he accused Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch of “trying to play the same game” to get around the decision to dismiss the cases.

“The suggestion that proceeding with the prosecution is somehow a reasonable next step is preposterous,” Hardiman wrote. “Besides, it is inequitable. The defendants sought relief in this court and they won that relief. If the attorney general is allowed nonetheless to proceed with these prosecutions -- as if dismissal had never been granted -- that relief will surely be a hollow victory.”

In a legal brief, Special Assistant Attorney General Christian F. Capizzo said, “It must be noted at the outset that the public defender’s blatant misstatement of the facts and court proceedings regarding the above cases is disingenuous.”

The attorney general’s office never made a motion to proceed with prosecution of those cases, Capizzo said. Rather, the public defender requested a stay of all proceedings in those cases, and prosecutors “merely objected,” he said.

“At no time has the state moved to put the above cases on a so-called ‘accelerated path to disposition’ as the public defender wants this court to believe,” Capizzo wrote. “At no time has the state proposed to move these cases to final adjudication in order to circumvent the court’s decision. In actuality, the state is merely looking to maintain the status quo under the law as it currently exists.”

Prosecutors do want to continue with arraignments, bail violations and status conferences involving these 17-year-olds, attorney general’s spokesman Michael J. Healey said. But, he said, “We are not talking about substantive pretrial conferences at which both sides ordinarily could be expected to talk about possible disposition. And we are not talking about disposition.”

Capizzo said, “The state is exercising its statutory right to appeal while maintaining the status quo and following the law as proscribed in the state of Rhode Island. One does not have to turn to distant states and long-ago decisions, as the public defender has resorted to, in order to determine how the law in Rhode Island applies to these cases.”

Also, Capizzo questioned whether the stay sought by the public defender would result in the release of “dangerous individuals” now being held without bail, or whether the state would be precluded from prosecuting them if they committed new offenses or violated bail conditions.

In his brief, Hardiman said, “There is a simple solution to the attorney general’s apparent need to rush to judgment: Let him proceed in the Family Court.” But Capizzo said it has not been determined whether Family Court would have jurisdiction.