Update: According to reports, the defendant has been released from prison after accepting the prosecutor’s offer of manslaughter with time served.
Nearly twenty six years after being sentenced to 17 years to life in prison at age 18, a Newport Beach man convicted of 2nd degree murder for the 1984 killing of his male roommate has been granted a new trial.
The reprieve came as a result of a California law, newly passed in 1999, which now allows a defendant to use evidence of “intimate partner battering” to mitigate the degree of certain murders. The law, analogous to “battered woman syndrome”, extends to same-sex couples the right to use evidence of psychological trauma inflicted by a victim through physical or emotional abuse as a partial defense.
At his original trial, the defendant asserted he stabbed the victim over 30 times in self-defense after the victim, more than 10 years his senior, attempted to sodomize him at knifepoint. Further, the defendant claimed the victim had previously made numerous unsolicited sexual advances toward him and may also have raped him one time while he was unconscious. In need of food, shelter as well as a steady supply of cocaine to feed his addiction, however, the youthful defendant stayed with the man.
Without the support of this new law, the defense attorney was forced at the time to argue for a straight acquittal rather than attempting to get a lesser verdict of voluntary manslaughter. |