Take the case of Marvin Vernis Smith, the wealthy liquor store owner who viciously murdered his lovely wife Minnie with a fireplace poker and then made the bloody crime scene at the couple’s Cypress residence look like a burglary gone wrong.
At one point, prosecutors weren’t sure they could nab a cocky Smith and he walked free as a man worth $5 million as a result of inheriting Minnie’s half of their estate.
Then Michael F. Murray, a ranking member of Orange County’s District Attorney’s elite homicide unit, took the case, convinced a jury that Smith was guilty and watched as an appeals court later nixed the conviction on a dubious technicality.
Now–five years after the brutal murder, an incarcerated Smith learned the news: a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana, which had reversed his conviction and 25 years to life sentence earlier this year, today reversed it’s reversal.
Why?
The California Supreme Court strongly hinted to the appellate panel that it had erred.
The result: As it stands, Smith–who was represented by defense lawyers Jennifer Keller and Kay Rackauckas–won’t get the new trial he’d been seeking.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.