Lawyers for imprisoned music producer Phil Spector urged a state appellate court this week to throw out his second-degree murder conviction for killing actress Lana Clarkson in his Alhambra mansion.<\/p>\n
In papers filed Wednesday, attorneys for the music legend cited several arguments as to why justices from the 2nd District Court of Appeal should grant the 70-year-old a new trial, but they focused heavily on a judge\u2019s decision to allow testimony from five women who said Spector menaced them with firearms in the decades leading up to Clarkson\u2019s shooting.<\/p>\n
Those accounts, which portrayed Spector as a violent misogynist, became \u201cthe heart of the state\u2019s case, the sine qua non of its efforts to gain a conviction\u201d and amounted to impermissible character testimony, the lawyers wrote.<\/p>\n
A Superior Court jury found Spector guilty last year of second-degree murder in the 2003 fatal shooting of Clarkson. He is serving a sentence of 19 years to life in prison.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Judge Larry Paul Fidler told jurors last year that the testimony of the women could be evidence that Clarkson\u2019s death from a single gunshot wound to her mouth was not the result of a mistake, accident or, as Spector\u2019s defense contended, suicide, but not as evidence that he had a propensity to commit crimes. <\/p>\n
Spector\u2019s lawyers argued that the judge undercut his admonition by allowing prosecutors to use the word \u201cpattern\u201d more than 40 times in their summations to describe the producer\u2019s conduct with women and guns.<\/p>\n
\u201cAsserting that a defendant has a \u2018pattern\u2019 of violent conduct is indistinguishable from arguing that he or she has a propensity or character trait for violence,\u201d lawyers Dennis Riordan, Donald Horgan and Charles Sevilla wrote.<\/p>\n
The state attorney general\u2019s office is to file a response next month, but a decision could be more than a year away. The case file sent to the appellate court for review includes transcripts from two trials \u2013 the first in 2007 ended in a hung jury \u2013 and is more than 18,000 pages long.<\/p>\n
— Harriet Ryan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lawyers for imprisoned music producer Phil Spector urged a state appellate court this week to throw out his second-degree murder conviction for killing actress Lana Clarkson in his Alhambra mansion. In papers filed Wednesday, attorneys for the music legend cited several arguments as to why justices from the 2nd District Court of Appeal should grant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5470"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}