A Los Angeles choose on Monday denied a request by protection legal professionals looking for to indefinitely halt the high-profile homicide trial of aged New York actual property scion Robert Durst on the grounds he’s gravely sick with most cancers and different well being issues.
Durst, 78, is charged with the December 2000 homicide of his long-time confidant, Susan Berman, a author he’s accused of fatally taking pictures due to what she might need identified concerning the unsolved disappearance and presumed killing of his spouse 20 years earlier.
Prosecutors have stated Durst’s 2015 arrest within the Berman case was hastened by his obvious confession to a number of killings in an Emmy award-winning, HBO tv documentary sequence “The Jinx.”
Durst’s lead lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, argued on Monday his consumer’s well being has grown “a lot worse” within the 14 months for the reason that trial was suspended final March on account of COVID-19 restrictions imposed shortly after testimony started.
The emergency protection movement for indefinite postponement cited quite a few life-threatening medical points that Durst’s legal professionals say he faces, together with bladder most cancers and a recurrence of esophageal most cancers.
Deputy District Lawyer John Lewin known as the protection movement a ploy to make “this trial go away.”
Superior Court docket Choose Mark Windham sided with prosecutors, ruling {that a} bodily dysfunction doesn’t essentially impair one’s competence to face trial.
The protection additionally requested Durst be launched on bail and positioned beneath digital monitoring in a non-public hospital to acquire essential medical remedy at his personal expense.
“The physician stated he’s in want of pressing hospitalization,” DeGuerin instructed the choose. “The query is just not whether or not he can endure the trials of the trial, the query is whether or not he can survive in any respect.”
Windham stated he would set a future listening to on Durst’s medical situation and whether or not he requires hospitalization.
Durst, who was not current for Monday’s proceedings, faces a most sentence of life in jail if convicted.
Berman, 55, was discovered slain in her Beverly Hills dwelling a few months after police in New York have been reported to have reopened an investigation into the destiny of Durst’s partner, Kathleen, who was a medical pupil when she vanished in 1982.
Durst, the multimillionaire grandson of a Manhattan actual property magnate, has been questioned by investigators about his spouse however insists he had nothing to do together with her disappearance. He was by no means prosecuted in that probe.
The circumstances surrounding each circumstances, and Durst’s 2003 acquittal within the killing and dismemberment of a neighbor in Texas, the place he had been residing within the guise of a girl, gained broad consideration in “The Jinx.”
Durst was arrested on suspicion of Berman’s homicide in March 2015, at some point earlier than the airing of the ultimate episode, through which he appeared to incriminate himself. After being confronted with a key piece of proof, a microphone captured Durst muttering to himself: “There it’s, you are caught,” and “What the hell did I do? Killed all of them, after all.”
In ordering Durst to face trial, the choose stated in 2018 that Durst’s “cryptic” off-camera comment “operates as a succinct confession” absent a proof from the defendant.
Protection legal professionals stated final March that Durst would take the witness stand in his personal protection in the course of the trial.
Our Requirements: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
