Hmmmm......Interesting....
Twenty years ago, Westerfield's lawyer won acquittal with similar defense |
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SAN DIEGO —In some ways, David Westerfield's defense to the murder of Danielle van Dam has its origins in a cheap California motel room in the dusty border town of Calexico. There on a sweltering July morning in 1981, someone shot a jeweler named Tom Wood in the back of the head and ran off with $20,000 he had in briefcase. Police detectives quickly zeroed in on Robert Corenevsky, a restaurant owner and sometime drug informant who was seen with the victim shortly before the murder and was flush with cash right after it. Wood had even written Corenevsky's name and license plate number on a will in which he said he feared for his life. But when the case finally went to trial, 12 jurors acquitted Corenevsky of all charges and even lined up to shake hands with him after the verdict. His defense? An alibi using forensic evidence to establish the time of death. His lawyer? Steven Feldman. Two decades later and 120 miles away in a San Diego courtroom, Feldman is using the same approach to defend Westerfield. As in the Corenevsky trial, the strongest evidence for the defense are expert witnesses who claim the prosecutor's time line is at odds with what they present as the unimpeachable, impartial facts of science. It was the Corenevsky case that opened Feldman's eyes to the power of a time-of-death alibi and made him known as a specialist in the area. In a legal journal article about the case, Feldman wrote, "While it is obvious that great accuracy in pinpointing time of death exists only in detective novels and television fiction, scientists nonetheless have developed a number of methods for narrowing down times of death that can be extremely useful to criminal defense practitioners." Because Danielle van Dam was missing nearly a month and her body was severely decomposed, the experts battling in the current case — four forensic entomologists, an anthropologist and two pathologists — are debating which range of days or even weeks is accurate. But in the Corenevsky case, a hotel maid found Wood's body the same day as his murder and the disagreement between experts, including six pathologists who testified, concerned hours and even parts of hours. The night before Wood's murder, a waitress saw the victim and Corenevsky drinking tequila and brandy in the bar of the A's Fiesta Motel, a motor inn a few miles from Interstate 8. Neither man lived anywhere near Calexico and how they got to the small town and met each other was disputed during the trial. Corenevsky, who has since died, claimed he worked for both American and Mexican drug authorities as an informant on cross-border narcotics traffic. He maintained that Wood, a jewelry store owner from Manhattan Beach in Orange County, was providing information about a heroin ring. Prosecutors alleged that Corenevsky lured Wood to the desert town under the pretext of discussing a deal on discount gold, but always planned to rob him. The waitress last saw the pair together at 8:45 p.m. The next morning, just before noon, the maid unlocked the door to Room 116 and found Wood on the floor. A single hollow-point bullet from a .22-caliber gun had pierced the back of his skull. Wood's own handgun was still strapped to his leg and his briefcase was empty. When police detectives searched the victim's home, they found a handwritten will in his safe. In it, Wood said he feared something bad would happen to him in Calexico and gave the number of Corenevsky's vanity license plates, PECAS 1, as well as his alias "Charlie Rogers" and the name of Drug Enforcement Agent official who allegedly worked with Corenevsky. Detectives tracked down Corenevsky at his home in El Segundo near Los Angeles. There was no sign of the stolen money, but the landlord told police Corenevsky had just paid him a year's rent, $10,200, in cash. Corenevsky was arrested and charged with murder. But the trial itself went on trial before testimony could begin. Authorities in Imperial County wanted to seek the death penalty against Corenevsky who was rumored to have escaped from a Mexican prison where he was serving time for murder. But the county was then the poorest in the state with an annual deficit of $4 million, and local officials refused to pay the estimated $500,000 Corenevsky's defense would cost. The town's auditor was jailed at one point for not cutting a check for defense costs and ultimately, a judge ruled the town could not pursue a death sentence against Corenevsky and that the trial should be moved to Orange County because of the local political wranglings. The case finally went to trial in 1986 with Feldman, Corenevsky's seventh attorney, as lead counsel. Feldman offered jurors a couple arguments for acquittal. He said, for example, that there was no proof Wood actually brought the $20,000 to Calexico. But his main focus was on the time of death. Corenevsky had an ironclad alibi for part of the morning Wood was killed. The defendant was spotted at his home near Los Angeles, a 246-mile drive from Calexico, in the late morning. The main pathologist to testify for the prosecution said he could not give an accurate estimate of the time Wood died. He said toxicological evidence from alcohol in the body could be skewed because Wood might have continued to metabolize alcohol as he lay dying. Feldman responded with three medical examiners of his own, including famed pathologist Cyril Wecht. Wecht pointed out that the chief prosecution expert had overlooked gunshot particles around the wound, a misstep that in Feldman's opinion, severely undercut the medical examiner and established Wecht as a superior scientist. Wecht concluded that Wood died between 6:30 and 9 a.m., when Corenevsky was far from Calexico. The other defense experts agreed. "I was trying to keep the window (of time) open wide and Steve kept trying to close it," then prosecutor Deputy Attorney General William Wood (no relation to the victim) told Courttv.com. Wood called two other pathologists one of whom said the murder could have occurred as early as 3 a.m., but when the jury returned a not guilty verdict, Wood said he assumed the time-of-death testimony was the reason. |
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