Los Angeles- [The Independent]- Phil Spector's defence lawyers argued yesterday that the legendary music producer could not have killed the failed actress Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his mansion home four years ago because the forensic evidence excluded the possibility that Ms Clarkson died by anything other than her own hand.
On the second day of opening statements, Linda Kenney Baden for the defence delved into the gruesome details of blood spatter and broken teeth in an effort to convince the jury that murder in this case was a scientific impossibility.
Like her colleague Bruce Cutler, who began the opening arguments on Wednesday, Ms Kenney Baden poured scorn on the district attorney's office and its motives in pressing charges, suggesting investigators got it into their heads they were looking at a murder case and never seriously considered any alternative. "Murder on their mind," was how Mr Cutler characterised their viewpoint.
He suggested Ms Clarkson's death was, rather, the result of something he called "accidental suicide" - a term unfamiliar to criminologists that suggests some mixture of death wish and drunken misadventure.
Between them, the defence lawyers depicted Ms Clarkson, who was working as a hostess at the House of Blues night club when she met Mr Spector on the fatal night, as a failed actress with a history of depression and her own experience of firearms. The prosecution has made strenuous efforts to prevent the defence from trashing the character of the dead woman, and peppered the defence's opening with objections - at least 10 of which were upheld by Judge Larry Paul Fidler.
On Tuesday, the deputy district attorney Alan Jackson presented the case as a relatively simple one. Mr Spector, in his telling, was a man with a long history of violence towards women who got drunk, got angry, and shot Ms Clarkson when she tried to leave his house at 5am on 3 February 2003. Mr Jackson promised to present four women who claim to have been subjected to gun threats by Mr Spector in the past.
Mr Cutler sought to undermine the women's testimony in advance. "These were women who were drawn to him and came back to him after the incidents," he told the jury. "The evidence will show they kept taking and spending his money."
Ms Kenney Baden raised one prosecution theory after another - including ones that have long since been discarded - and knocked them down on scientific grounds. "This intra-oral gunshot wound would not be possible except when self-inflicted," she said.
As a defence strategy, it seemed like a stretch, according to legal experts watching the trial live on television. Any number of factors - fear, drunkenness, mistaking the grave danger for a game - might have induced Ms Clarkson to open her mouth willingly before the gun was fired, they said.
The opening statements were expected to be followed by evidence from the four women who claimed to have been threatened by Mr Spector at different times over the past 19 years. If convicted, Mr Spector, who is 67, faces up to 15 years behind bars.
