Telegraph file photo Nicole Kasinskas, who is seeking a hearing on her petition to have her prison sentence commuted, is shown in Superior Court during her 2005 plea and sentencing hearing.

CONCORD – In the summer of 2003, just two months after she turned 16, Nashua resident Nicole Kasinskas was arrested by police within hours after her mother, Jeanne Dominico, was murdered in her Nashua home.

Police charged Kasinskas, now 32, with offenses that accused her of participating in the scheme to kill her mother. In September 2005, two years and a month after the murder, Kasinskas was sentenced to at least 35 years in prison.

Now, Kasinskas, a State Prison for Women inmate for nearly 15 years, and who turns 33 next month, is asking the Executive Council to grant her request for a hearing on her petition to commute her sentence.

The council is scheduled to take up the matter at Wednesday’s meeting, the agenda for which notes that Kasinskas is not eligible for an annulment.

Commutation of a sentence means a defendant’s prison term is reduced, either in part or in its entirety. The power to commute a sentence rests with governors as well as the president.

Such requests of the Executive Council are rare; being granted a hearing is almost unheard of. Gov. Chris Sununu has indicated in the past he is against such hearings.

The murder on Aug. 6, 2003 was as grisly as it was shocking to members of Jeanne Dominico’s extended family, her co-workers and wide circle of friends, as well as neighbors, some of whom milled around her Dumaine Avenue home in disbelief as detectives conducted their investigation.

The sentence that then-Judge William Groff imposed at the Sept. 8, 2005 hearing was part of a plea arrangement in which Kasinskas agreed to testify against her one-time boyfriend, William Sullivan Jr., who was convicted at trial several months earlier of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder.

Sullivan, 18 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.

According to police reports and testimony in court, Kasinskas and Sullivan, whose relationship consisted mainly of online communications – Sullivan lived in Willimantic, Conn. at the time – plotted the murder in response to Dominico’s refusal to let her daughter live with Sullivan in Willimantic.

“She loved you, Nicole. She was very proud of you, and she knew that moving to Connecticut was not in your best interest,” Christopher McGowan, Dominico’s fiancee, told Kasinskas at her plea and sentencing hearing.

McGowan was one of several people close to Dominico who delivered victim impact statements or otherwise addressed the court at the hearing.

On the day of the murder, the reports state that Kasinskas sat in Sullivan’s car at the 7-11 at the corner of Amherst Street and Deerwood Drive, while Sullivan walked across Deerwood Drive to Dumaine Avenue and went inside the house.

He reportedly beat her with a baseball bat and stabbed her 40 times while Kasinskas waited at the 7-11. She told authories she went to the house a short time later, stepped over her mother’s body to get a cloth, and began cleaning up the blood.

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.