Story Created:
Mar 23, 2009 at 8:57 PM PST
Story Updated:
Mar 24, 2009 at 5:00 PM PST
Phil Spector’s attorney told jurors Tuesday that forensic evidence proves the record producer’s innocence in actress Lana Clarkson’s February 2003 shooting death at his Alhambra mansion.
“Phillip Spector did not kill Lana Clarkson. That’s what the evidence shows. That’s what the truth shows,” defense attorney Doron Weinberg told the panel, which heard a second day of closing arguments in the 69-year-old music industry figure’s murder trial.
The prosecution’s case “relies on the starting proposition that Phillip Spector is a bad person,” and focused singularly on attempting to prove that the 40-year-old actress was murdered and “trying to prove that he did it,” Weinberg said.
“The forensic evidence shows that Phillip Spector is innocent,” the attorney said, using a large courtroom screen to list 14 pieces of scientific evidence that he said bolster the defense’s contention that Clarkson shot herself.
There was no evidence of a struggle between Clarkson and Spector, “absolutely no evidence that the gun was forced or jammed” into her mouth and no traces of Spector’s DNA anywhere on the gun, Weinberg told jurors.
That was “completely consistent with Lana Clarkson having held that gun to her own mouth,” the defense attorney said.
Weinberg told jurors that the testimony of limousine driver Adriano De Souza — who reported that Spector emerged from the mansion with a handgun and said, “I think I killed somebody” — along with the accounts of five women who allege that they had gun-related confrontations with Spector can be debated.
“But the science is not debatable,” he told jurors.
Weinberg noted that a key prosecution expert conceded that she couldn’t say Spector fired the shot or that a single piece of evidence opposed the theory that Clarkson shot herself.
He said the scientific testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses was “designed to support the theory of homicide,” and suggested that law enforcement officers felt they had “no need to think about anything else” after hearing De Souza’s report of an alleged confession by Spector.
“They never imagined this was anything other than a homicide,” Weinberg said.
Spector’s attorney said his client “neither confessed nor did he hide evidence,” as the prosecution has suggested Spector did before police arrived at his home.
Spector is charged with shooting Clarkson on Feb. 23, 2003, hours after the two met at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where she had recently begun working as a VIP hostess.
Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler ruled Friday that he would allow jurors to consider the lesser offense of involuntary manslaughter along with the murder charge.
That option was not given to the first jury that heard the case against Spector. That jury deadlocked 10-2 in September 2007, with the majority voting in favor of convicting him of murder.
In her closing argument Monday, Deputy District Attorney Truc Do told jurors that Clarkson’s shooting was “a death waiting to happen in [Spector’s] world” after his alcohol-fueled, gun-related confrontations with five other women.
She cited the testimony of five other women who allege Spector confronted them with a gun between 1975 and 1995, and said he had played “Russian roulette” with them after drinking and losing control.
“When he’s ignited, he always does the same thing — he grabs a gun,” the prosecutor said. “In every single one of these incidents, Mr. Spector demonstrates conscious disregard for human life.”
She said “Lana Clarkson happened to be the sixth who got the bullet.”
Do told the panel that the defense had “cherry-picked” from Clarkson’s e-mails to make it seem as if she was despondent about her life, although she had “persevered through those difficult times” and bought eight pairs of new shoes a day earlier.
Either Do or her colleague, Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson, are expected to deliver the prosecution’s rebuttal argument Wednesday after Weinberg finishes his closing argument.
Spector, renowned in music circles for the “Wall of Sound” technique he invented in the 1960s and used in his work with the Righteous Brothers, the Ronettes and other groups, is free on $1 million bail posted shortly after his arrest.
Clarkson, who was best known for her starring role in the 1985 Roger Corman cult hit “Barbarian Queen,” had bit parts on dozens of television shows and in a few well-known movies, such as 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
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