Spector's lawyer goes negative -- on his own client
Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times
Since his murder retrial began a month ago, Phil Spector has heard himself described as a gun-obsessed boor with a mouth filthier than a truck stop restroom and mood swings as sharp and scary as a dagger.
Surprisingly, this ugly portrait came courtesy not of prosecutors -- although they've offered their own unflattering character sketch -- but from the legendary music producer's own lawyer. In a strategic change from his first trial, which ended in a hung jury last year, the defense has acknowledged abusive, dangerous and unstable behavior by Spector and even provided jurors with details of such episodes.
The approach, his lawyer says, is the only way to combat what the defense considers the most damning evidence against Spector in the fatal 2003 shooting of actress Lana Clarkson: the testimony of five women who say he terrorized them with guns under similar circumstances.
"The alternative is allowing the jury to believe Mr. Spector hates women and women only," his lawyer, Doron Weinberg, told an L.A. County Superior Court judge in November.
Questioning prosecution witnesses, Weinberg has seized on instances in which Spector drew weapons on men or carried firearms in the course of his daily life. He asked a woman who alleges Spector pistol-whipped her when they were dating in the early 1990s to recount a time when the producer pulled a revolver on a group of young men who mistook him for the actor Dudley Moore.
"All of a sudden he was chasing them down the street," Dorothy Melvin testified.
Spector, 67, faces a minimum of 18 years in prison if convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Clarkson. The 40-year-old was shot to death in the foyer of his Alhambra mansion three hours after they met at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, where she was working as a hostess. Spector's defense contends she killed herself.
Prosecutors maintain that Spector pulled the trigger when she expressed a desire to leave the palatial home. The theory is based in part on the experiences of the five women in the three decades before Clarkson's death. The prosecution argues the incidents show a pattern that culminated in her murder. In each account, the women were alone with Spector when he had been drinking. When they expressed a desire to go home -- or, in one case, refused to enter his hotel room -- he responded by pulling a gun, the women say.
