Steven Walter Robinson, better known as the Fullerton AMC slasher, was improperly convicted and sentenced to 22 years to life in prison for attempting to murder fellow theatergoers at a 2008 screening of the horror film The Signal.
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“Substantial evidence suggested the defendant may not have formed the intent to kill, premeditated or deliberated, due to a mental disorder,” wrote Justice Raymond Ikola for a three-justice panel that included Eileen Moore and Richard Aronson. “The defendant testified he hallucinated during the movie, feeling a 'sense of evil' coming from the movie screen. And the psychologist found the defendant was 'very mentally impaired.' His 'longstanding psychiatric symptoms' included 'psychotic thoughts (hearing voices, delusions)' and 'a history of depression with schizoid and paranoid features going well back into early adolescence.'”
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.