The scene inside the small Hawthorne apartment had all the hallmarks of an ordinary domestic killing.
Arthur Bonner, 35, stood in the bedroom with fresh scratches on his chest and a badly split lip. On the bed behind him lay the lifeless body of Angel Dews, his girlfriend of eight years. Dews' 12-year-old daughter said she had heard a commotion in the room while the door was locked.
But with Bonner's murder trial underway at the Airport Courthouse, his defense attorney is arguing that the June 2005 killing was far from ordinary. Bonner, he contends, had no idea what he was doing when he strangled his girlfriend while he was in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
"This is a tragedy for everyone involved," Deputy Public Defender Randall Rich said in the Los Angeles County Superior Court facility. "He did not understand he had killed her."
Though rare, the controversial epilepsy defense has been used for decades -- with mixed results -- to explain behavior ranging from trespassing to assassination.
In one of the most celebrated examples, Jack Ruby contended in his 1964 trial that he had killed Lee Harvey Oswald during a seizure. Jurors rejected his claim. By contrast, jurors in Northern California this year acquitted a Fairfield man of murder in the deaths of two children hit by a car after his attorney said he'd had a seizure while driving.
In Bonner's case, medical records show that he was first prescribed epilepsy medication in 1994 and has a history of seizures.
But Deputy Dist. Atty. Belle Chen said Bonner admitted to detectives after the killing that he had argued with Dews and that "I put my hands on her."
"When he squeezed her neck . . . it was not an accident," she told jurors last week. "He did it and he knew he was doing it."
More than 3 million Americans live with epilepsy, a neurological disorder marked by seizures caused by a surge in electrical activity in the brain. Seizures can take many forms and usually last from a few seconds to a few minutes.
Violence during an episode is rare. When it does occur, experts say, it usually takes the form of random, uncontrolled movements.
Susan Pietsch-Escueta, executive director of the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles, said she was skeptical that a person experiencing a seizure would strangle someone.
"People use this to excuse very bad behavior, and it just hurts all people with epilepsy," she said. "Strangling someone is not a random reaction."
