BANGOR – A Superior Court justice began considering Wednesday whether a Harrington man serving a 35-year prison sentence for murdering his 9-year-old son should be granted a new trial.

The attorney for 48-year-old Robert Ardolino is arguing that audiotaped police interviews of Ardolino’s other son, Daniel Ardolino, should have been played for jurors during Ardolino’s trial in March 1996.

New York attorney Robert Rosenthall argued that those tapes prove police used suggestive and biased interviewing tactics when they questioned Daniel Ardolino, then 11, who later became the state’s key witness against his father.

Rosenthall also told Chief Justice Andrew Mead that a transcript of an audiotape of an interview police conducted with Robert Ardolino the morning his son died contained 100 errors.

The tape was of poor quality, Rosenthall said, and the transcript contained numerous errors and blanks where the tape was inaudible.

Rosenthall had the tape enhanced and said some of the statements Robert Ardolino made on the tape were important and should have been heard by jurors.

The lawyer claims Ardolino’s trial attorney, Daniel Lilley of Portland, should have listened more carefully to the tapes of Daniel Ardolino’s interview and used the interviewing techniques used by police to help discredit the boy’s trial testimony that implicated his father in Matthew Ardolino’s death.

Rosenthall said Lilley also should have had the tape containing Robert Ardolino’s interview enhanced before the trial so he could have picked up on the inaccuracies in the transcript.

“These both point to ineffective assistance of counsel,” Rosenthall told Mead.

Assistant Attorney General William Stokes noted to the judge during his closing argument Wednesday that the Maine Supreme Judicial Court had rejected the argument regarding the tape of Robert Ardolino, saying that the defense had plenty of opportunity to enhance the tape before trial and the errors in the transcript were not significant in the scope of the state’s evidence against Ardolino.

Mead took the matter under advisement and said he would issue a written decision as soon as possible.

Ardolino was convicted of killing his 9-year-old son, Matthew Ardolino, at the family’s Harrington home in 1993. Daniel Ardolino testified at trial that his father kicked Matthew in the stomach and jabbed him repeatedly in the abdomen with a baseball bat.

Matthew Ardolino died several hours later from a massive abdominal infection caused when his small intestine ruptured.