Wearing a red jumpsuit, the 55-year-old Peterson showed off his handcuffed hands and told reporters: "Three squares a day and this spiffy outfit. Look at all this bling." A judge postponed his arraignment until May 18 because no Peterson attorneys were present at the hearing.
Prosecutors have not said much about the evidence they have against Peterson in Savio's death, but it's clear they want to use the law to let Savio tell jurors why Peterson wanted her dead.
"In essence, what you're basically allowing the victim of a violent crime to do is testify from the grave," Will County State's Attorney James Glasgow said Thursday in announcing the charges against Peterson.
The Illinois law allows a judge to admit hearsay evidence in first-degree murder cases if prosecutors can prove the defendant killed a witness to prevent them from testifying. It passed last year amid attention to the October 2007 disappearance of Peterson's fourth wife, 23-year-old Stacy Peterson.
Possible evidence in the Savio case includes letters of protection in which she said Peterson would kill her to shut her up and her sister's testimony to a coroner's jury that Savio told her family it would be no accident if she died.
Peterson's attorneys have vowed to challenge the constitutionality of admitting such evidence. The Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to confront his accusers, something they can't do with an absent witness.
Joel Brodsky, one of Peterson's attorneys, has said that allowing Savio's statements would amount to the court allowing "rumor and innuendo" as testimony.
Brodsky also said he could argue that the law was passed specifically to put Peterson behind bars, which is also unconstitutional.
"They're changing the law, changing the rules, changing forensic findings to get this guy," he said. "The law was not supposed to be made for a particular case."
The law's sponsors were careful never to link it publicly to Peterson. State Sen. A.J. Wilhelmi, D-Joliet, said the law wasn't designed for any single case, but one Republican analysis of the Democratic bill noted that it was introduced "in response to the Drew Peterson case."
The law requires a judge to hold a pretrial hearing to study whether the evidence shows that the defendant killed a witness and did so to prevent the witness from testifying. The judge would also have to decide whether the hearsay is reliable and whether admitting it would be in the best interests of justice.
The process alone puts the law on shaky ground, according to Joseph Tacopina, a defense attorney whose clients included a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
